A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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Housing Booms and Shirking
Quanlin Gu, Jia He, Wenlan Qian, Oct 03, 2018Our research studies the incentive costs of China’s housing booms . We use the type and actual time stamps of 9.3 million credit card transactions by over 200,000 cardholders to detect non-work-related behavior during work hours. Employees respond to positive house price shocks with an immediate and permanent increase in their propensity to use work hours to attend to personal needs. Our estimate implies an elasticity of shirking propensity with respect to house price of 1.6. The effect is driven by homeowners, especially among owners with higher housing wealth. Further analyses point to negative productivity implications of the increased shirking.
Ownership and Productivity in Vertically Integrated Firms in China
Loren Brandt, Feitao Jiang, Yao Luo, Yingjun Su, May 27, 2020This paper studies differences in the internal configuration and productivity in vertically integrated steel facilities in China using equipment-level information on inputs and output for each of the main stages in the value chain. At the facility level, we do not find statistically significant differences in productivity by ownership. This conceals important differences in the value chain: private firms outperform in pig iron...
Going Bankrupt in China
Bo Li, Jacopo Ponticelli, Aug 26, 2020We use a new case-level dataset to document a set of stylized facts on bankruptcy in China and study how the introduction of specialized courts across Chinese cities affected insolvency resolution and the local economy. We find that specialized courts hire better-trained judges and are 35% faster at dealing with bankruptcy cases than civil courts within the same city. We also find evidence that their introduction benefited the local economy by fostering firm entry, increasing average capital productivity, and favoring the reallocation of employment out of "zombie" firm–intensive sectors.
Hayek, Local Information, and the Decentralization of Chinese State-owned Enterprises
Lixin Colin Xu, May 23, 2018Hayek (1945) predicts that where local information is important, the organization of production should be decentralized. This prediction is tested and supported in the context of the decentralization of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). SOEs are more likely to decentralize with increasing distance from the seat of the oversight government. This likelihood is especially strong when performance heterogeneity is greater and/or transportation costs are higher.
From Fog to Smog: The Value of Pollution Information
Panle Jia Barwick, Shanjun Li, Liguo Lin, Eric Zou, Feb 05, 2020During 2013–2014, China launched a nation-wide real-time air quality monitoring and disclosure program, which was a watershed moment in the history of its environmental regulations. We present the first empirical analysis of this natural experiment by exploiting its staggered introduction across cities. The program substantially expanded public access to pollution information, and in turn, triggered a cascade...
