A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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The Effect of Computer-Assisted Learning on Students’ Long-Term Development
Nicola Bianchi, Yi Lu, Hong Song, Feb 17, 2021We examine the effect of computer-assisted learning on students’ long-term development. We explore the implementation of the largest ed-tech intervention in the world to date, which connected China’s best teachers to more than 100 million rural students through satellite internet. Exposure to the program improved students’ academic achievement, labor performance, and computer usage for at least ten years after program implementation. These findings indicate...
Overpricing in China’s Corporate Bond Market
Yi Ding, Wei Xiong, Jinfan Zhang, Nov 27, 2019In China’s corporate bond market, the yield spread of newly issued bonds at their first secondary-market trade is on average 5.35 bps higher than the issuance spread. This overpricing is robust across bond issuances with different credit ratings, maturities, issuance types, and issuer status. Evidence suggests that competition among underwriters drives this overpricing through two specific channels—either through rebates to participants in issuance auctions or through direct auction bidding by the underwriters for themselves or their clients.
Mortgage Prepayment in China
Zhenyu Gao, Wenxi Jiang, Haohan Ren, Kemin Wang, Yuezhi Wu, Sep 10, 2025During the 2019–2024 monetary easing cycle, Chinese households used their savings to prepay unprecedented amounts of mortgage loans. Because refinancing was restricted, mortgage rates remained rigid, while savings returns quickly adjusted to rate cuts. The widening gap between borrowing costs and savings returns encouraged prepayment (deleveraging) and reduced consumption. Our findings suggest that the rigid mortgage rates have rendered China’s monetary easing counterproductive.
How Do Zombie Firms Affect Innovation? Evidence from China’s Industrial Firms
Yun Dai, Wei Li, Yongqin Wang, May 08, 2019Zombie firms are insolvent firms that continue to operate due to continued access to financing at extremely low costs. Nie et al. (2016) find that in the year 2013 about 14 percent of Chinese-listed firms and 7.5 percent of Chinese manufacturing firms are defined as zombie firms. The large amount of financing subsidies distributed to insolvent zombie firms...
Mapping U.S.-China Technology Decoupling, Innovation, and Firm Performance
Pengfei Han, Wei Jiang, Danqing Mei, Dec 01, 2021We 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...
