Most Popular

Centralization or Decentralization? The Evolution of State-Ownership in China

Franklin Allen, Junhui Cai, Xian Gu, Jun Qian, Linda Zhao, Wu Zhu, Apr 05, 2023

We developed an SOE index for all 40 million firms in China from 1990 to 2017 based on the dynamic EquiNet. This quantitative index is solely based on equity investments and thus clears up the mysteries of other self-report measures.

Bilateral Trade and Shocks in Political Relations: Evidence from China

Yingxin Du, Jiandong Ju, Carlos D. Ramirez, Xi Yao, Mar 14, 2018

To what extent do political relations between countries affect their economic exchange? Using evidence of China’s relations with other major powers during the period of 1990 to 2013, Yingxin Du, Jiandong Ju, Carlos D. Ramirez, and Xi Yao point out the time-aggregation bias in the existing empirical research and provide insights on the relationship between political shocks and trade.

The Long-Run Trend of Residential Investment in China

Ding Ding, Weicheng Lian, Oct 09, 2019

Residential investment has been a key growth engine for China in the last two decades. Total housing investment grew from about 4 percent of GDP in 1997 to a peak of 15 percent of GDP in 2014, with residential investment accounting for more than two-thirds of it. Our analysis indicates that structural changes in the Chinese economy that led to rebalancing toward consumption...

Accounting for Urban China’s Rising Income Inequality: The Roles of the Labor Market, Human Capital, and Marriage Market Factors

Shuaizhang Feng, Gaojie Tang, Mar 27, 2019

China has witnessed persistent increases in economic inequality since the early 1990s when the urban labor market began its transformation — from centrally-controlled to market-driven. Using the Urban Household Survey data, this paper (Feng and Tang, 2018) documents the trends...

The “Trusted-assistant” Loan in Nineteenth Century China

Meng Miao, Guanjie Niu, Thomas Noe, Nov 08, 2017

In this paper, we analyze “trusted-assistant loans,” which were loans issued (typically) by Shanxi Banks during the Qing period to finance newly appointed scholar-officials. Even though creditors lacked legal rights and, in fact, lacked every repayment enforcement mechanism advanced by economic contract theory, repayment rates on these loans were relatively high and they constituted a large and profitable portion of many banks’ loan portfolios. This paper develops a theory of “resource-based” debt contract enforcement that rationalizes repayment and tests the hypothesis of this theory using data from scholar-officials’ diaries and nineteenth century Chinese bank records.