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.
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.
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...
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...
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.