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China’s Producer Price Reflation in 2016–2017: Capacity Cuts or Recovering Aggregate Demand?

Linxi Chen, Ding Ding, Rui C. Mano, Nov 23, 2018

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...

Decoding China’s Industrial Policies

Hanming Fang, Ming Li, Guangli Lu, Jul 02, 2025

Industrial 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.

China’s Growing Presence in Tax Havens: Implications for Policy and Research

Chris Clayton, Antonio Coppola, Amanda Dos Santos, Matteo Maggiori, Jesse Schreger, Jul 12, 2023

Chinese firms are increasingly utilizing tax havens like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and the British Virgin Islands to raise large sums of capital from foreign investors, accounting for over 60% of total offshore equities by 2020.

The Data Privacy Paradox of Alipay Users

Long Chen, Yadong Huang, Shumiao Ouyang, Wei Xiong, Jul 07, 2021

We find that there is no relationship between the self-stated privacy concerns of a sample of Alipay users and their number of data-sharing authorizations with third-party mini-programs on Alipay. We explain this data privacy paradox by a curious finding that users with stronger privacy concerns tend to benefit more from using mini-programs, which further suggests that consumers may develop data privacy concerns as a by-product of the process of using digital applications, not because such concerns are innate.

How Does the Interaction between China’s Monetary and Regulatory Policies Impact Shadow Banking and Total Bank Credit?

Kaiji Chen, Jue Ren, Tao Zha, Jul 12, 2017

Following the four Trillion RMB fiscal stimulus in 2009, People's Bank of China tightened up its M2 supply. Kaiji Chen, Jue Ren and Zha Tao from Emory University and Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta explored how the banks reacted to the tightening of M2 supply by expanding shadow banking activities, and how the rapid growth of shadow banking in turn hampers the effectiveness of monetary policy.