A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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FinTech Adoption and Household Risk-Taking
Claire Yurong Hong, Xiaomeng Lu, Jun Pan, Dec 16, 2020China has experienced a rapid increase in FinTech penetration in the form of offline digital payments over the past decade. Using unique account-level data on consumption, investments, and FinTech usage from the Ant Group, we find that FinTech can lower investment barriers and help households move toward optimal risk-taking. Inferring individuals’ risk tolerance from their consumption volatility, we find that individuals who are more risk tolerant benefit more from FinTech advancement. Examining the enhancement...
Pushing on a String: State-Owned Enterprises and Monetary Policy Transmission in China
Peter Tillmann, Hongyi Chen, Apr 18, 2018In China, a large share of enterprises is state-owned and has preferential access to finances. This should affect the way the economy responds to changes in monetary policy. We find that a policy easing is more effective than a policy tightening – which is consistent with the PBC being able to “push on a string”.
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.
Impacts of Monetary-Fiscal Policy Interaction
Kaiji Chen, Haoyu Gao, Patrick Higgins, Daniel F. Waggoner, Tao Zha, Dec 02, 2020China’s 2009 stimulus presents an ideal case for exploring the impacts of monetary-fiscal interaction on credit allocation and investment. During this stimulus period, monetary stimulus itself did not favor SOEs over non-SOEs in credit access. Fiscal expansion, however, enhanced the monetary transmission to bank credit that was allocated to local government financing vehicles...
Can Information Influence the Social Insurance Participation of China’s Rural Migrants?
John Giles, Xin Meng, Sen Xue, Guochang Zhao, Apr 10, 2019We use a randomized information intervention to shed light on whether poor understanding of social insurance—in terms of both the enrollment process and the associated costs and benefits—drives the relatively low rates of participation in urban health insurance and pension programs among China's rural-urban migrants. Among workers without a contract...
