In late 2015, the Chinese government launched a multi-year plan to reduce capacity in the coal and steel industries. Around the same time, producer price inflation in China started to pick up strongly after being trapped in negative territory for 4½ years. What is behind this broad reflation—cuts in coal and steel capacity or a strengthening of aggregate demand...
We 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...
International borrowing by Chinese nationals has increased rapidly over the past 10 years. Some of this borrowing seems to be motivated by carry trade activities. Regulatory arbitrage may have played a role in this trend.
This paper provides new estimates of the housing stock, construction rates, and price developments by city tier in China.
To examine the implicit guarantee provided by Chinese local governments to local government financing vehicles (LGFV), we create a proxy for local governments’ implicit debt ratio and find it correlated with the credit spread of LGFV bonds.