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Carry Trade with Chinese Characteristics

Yi Huang, Ugo Panizza, Richard Portes, Jun 13, 2018

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.

The Great Chinese Inequality Turnaround

Ravi Kanbur, Yue Wang, Xiaobo Zhang, Jul 26, 2017

This paper argues that after a quarter century of sharp and sustained increase, Chinese inequality is now plateauing and even turning using various data sources and inequality perspectives. The evolution of inequality is further examined through decomposition by income sources and subgroups. Some preliminary explanations are provided for these trends in terms of shifts in policy and the structural transformation of the Chinese economy.

Mapping U.S.-China Technology Decoupling, Innovation, and Firm Performance

Pengfei Han, Wei Jiang, Danqing Mei, Dec 01, 2021

We develop measures for technology decoupling and dependence between the U.S. and China based on combined patent data. The first two decades of the century witnessed a steady increase in technology integration (or less decoupling), but China’s dependence on the U.S. increased (decreased) during the first (second) decade. Decoupling in a technology field predicts China’s growing dependence on U.S. technology, which, in turn, predicts less decoupling further down the road...

Data-Intensive Innovation and the State: Understanding China’s AI Leadership

Martin Beraja, David Yang, Noam Yuchtman, Sep 23, 2020

China 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.

The Chinese Saving Rate: Long-Term Care Risks, Family Insurance, and Demographics

Ayşe İmrohoroğlu, Kai Zhao, Sep 13, 2017

In this paper, we show that a general equilibrium model that properly captures the risks in old age, the role of family insurance, changes in demographics, and the productivity growth rate is capable of generating changes in the national saving rate in China that mimic the data well. Our findings suggest that the combination of the risks faced by the elderly and the deterioration of family insurance due to the one-child policy may account for approximately half of the increase in the saving rate between 1980 and 2010. We also show that changes in total factor productivity growth account for the fluctuations in the saving rate during this period.