A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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Faking Trade for Capital Control Evasion: Evidence from Dual Exchange Rate Arbitrage in China
Renliang Liu, Liugang Sheng, Jian Wang, Nov 25, 2020We examine whether firms over-report international trade to evade capital controls for foreign exchange arbitrage, by specifically testing whether the aggregate bilateral trade data gap between trading partners is positively (negatively) correlated with the exchange rate spread when the spread is positive (negative). At the disaggregated level, we also employ Benford’s law to detect trade data manipulations...
English Language Requirements and Educational Inequality in China
Hongbin Li, Lingsheng Meng, Kai Mu, Shaoda Wang, May 29, 2024The introduction of the English listening test in the NCEE has exacerbated educational inequality between urban and rural areas in China, thereby affecting the college admission prospects and future income of rural students.
Data-Intensive Innovation and the State: Understanding China’s AI Leadership
Martin Beraja, David Yang, Noam Yuchtman, Sep 23, 2020China has become a world leader in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), a data-intensive technology with the potential to transform the global economy. We argue that the Chinese state’s collection of data and provision of data to commercial firms contribute to China’s AI leadership. We provide supportive evidence from China’s facial recognition AI sector and develop a macroeconomic model that illustrates how the Chinese state's surveillance interest aligns with promoting AI innovation, but potentially at the expense of privacy.
Brain Drain: The Impact of Air Pollution on Firm Performance
Shuyu Xue, Bohui Zhang, Xiaofeng Zhao, Feb 12, 2020By exploiting the exogenous variation in air pollution caused by China’s central heating policy, we find that air pollution reduces the accumulation of executive talent and high-quality employees. We also find that firms located in polluted areas have poorer performance, especially for firms with greater dependence on human capital.
Decoding China’s Industrial Policies
Hanming Fang, Ming Li, Guangli Lu, Jul 02, 2025Industrial policy is often discussed through high-level narratives and flagship initiatives, yet its implementation—particularly at the subnational level—remains opaque. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to systematically analyze over three million government documents from 2000 to 2022, extracting structured policy information to decode China’s industrial policy at various levels of government. Combining these newly constructed granular industrial policy data with micro-level firm data, we document four sets of facts on China’s industrial policies, including the economic and political rationality of the choice of the target sectors, the dynamics of the policy tools, the diffusion and similarity of policies, and the effects on firm entry and productivity.
