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China Needs Tighter Macro-Prudential Regulations to Loosen Capital Controls

Ambrogio Cesa-Bianchi, Andrea Ferrero, Alessandro Rebucci, Nov 29, 2017

China is on a path to capital account liberalization. If the renminbi is to become an international reserve currency (e.g. Prasad, 2016), as it has started to and one day will be, China must have an open capital account. But once the capital account is open, the economy will be exposed to gyrations of the global financial cycle (Rey, 2014). This column argues that international credit supply shocks have powerful effects on real and financial variables of the receiving countries, but not all economies are affected similarly, and those that have lower loan-to-value ratios (LTVs) and limits on foreign currency borrowing (FXLs) are less vulnerable. As China lowers controls on capital flows (e.g., Benigno et al., 2016) it should consider tightening domestic macro-prudential policy regulations (e.g., Cesa-Bianchi and Rebucci (2017) to avoid excessive volatility.

How Did the US-China Trade War Affect American Communities?

Michael E. Waugh, Apr 22, 2020

The US-China trade war—the unprecedented tit-for-tat increase in tariffs by the US and China—provided a unique laboratory to study and understand how changes in trade policy can redistribute the gains from trade. I argue that the trade war induced concentrated losses in consumption and employment for American communities most exposed to Chinese retaliatory tariffs.

Spillovers in Childbearing Decisions and Fertility Transitions: Evidence from China

Pauline Rossi, Yun Xiao, Mar 24, 2021

To what extent and through which mechanisms are couples influenced by others when choosing their own family size? Recent research exploits exemptions in China’s family planning policies to show that conformism and competition drove the diffusion of small families, and hence accelerated the fertility transition in China.

Does China’s Place-Based Land Policy Lead to Spatial Misallocation?

Min Fang, Libin Han, Zibin Huang, Ming Lu, Li Zhang, Nov 17, 2021

After 2003, the Chinese central government implemented an inland-favoring land supply policy that distributed more construction land quotas to underdeveloped non-eastern regions. We investigate the effect of the policy and find that it drastically increased land and housing prices in more-developed eastern regions, which consequently created substantial spatial misallocation of land and labor. The policy seems to reduce regional output gaps; however, it hurt...

Can Investment Incentives Crowd Out Innovation? Evidence from China

Shaowei Ke, Yao Lu, Xinzheng Shi, Yeqing Zhang, Nov 06, 2019

The Chinese government has been using strong fiscal stimuli to encourage investment. While these fiscal policies, such as investment tax credits, often encourage firm investment, we find that investment tax incentives may generate an unintended reduction of firms’ innovation. Moreover, the crowding-out effect is non-monotonic in the level of financial constraints.