Exploiting the staggered rollout, since 2014, of judicial independence reform that removed local governments’ control over local courts’ financial and personnel decisions in China, we show that judicial independence can reduce local protectionism and foster cross-regional economic integration.
As the second largest economy, China intrigues heated debates among policymakers and researchers alike on how fast its economy will grow in the future and how truthfully the official data reflect its actual economic growth. Patrick Higgins and Tao Zha from the Atlanta Fed and Karen Zhong from Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance develop a replicable econometric model to shed light on these issues.
Inter-jurisdictional competition in a regionally decentralized authoritarian regime distorts local politicians’ incentives in resource allocation among firms from their own city and a competing city.
China has been shifting the composition of its external assets from accumulation of foreign reserves toward private, nonofficial outflows. This article provides an overview of the allocation patterns of outward equity investment by Chinese institutional investors (IIs) across destination countries and sectors. In their foreign portfolios, Chinese IIs overweight sectors in which China has a comparative disadvantage (for instance, computer software), and they concentrate...
The sharp appreciation of the U.S. dollar between mid-2014 and mid-2015 raised concerns in the U.S. and its major trading partners. Zheng Liu, Mark Spiegel, and Andrew Tai from the San Francisco Fed evaluate the impact of dollar appreciation on economic conditions in the United States and its three major Asian trading partners: South Korea, Japan, and China.