A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
Facebook 
Twitter 
Instagram
WeChat 
Email Most Popular
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.
Monetary Policy in China: A Trade-Off Between Transmission and Stability?
Kaiji Chen, Yiqing Xiao, Tao Zha, Sep 24, 2025We explore how China’s shift toward interest-rate-based monetary policy faces an inherent trade-off. When non-state banks turn to wholesale funding, monetary policy easing is transmitted more effectively to productive firms, but the banking system also becomes more fragile in economic downturns. Our findings suggest that China’s regulators must strike a careful balance between achieving policy effectiveness and safeguarding financial stability.
Consumer-Financed Fiscal Stimulus Evidence from Digital Coupons in China
Jing Ding, Lei Jiang, Lucy Msall, Matthew J. Notowidigdo, Feb 05, 2025In 2020, local governments in China began issuing digital coupons to stimulate spending in targeted categories such as restaurants and supermarkets. We find that the coupons caused large increases in spending of 3.1–3.3 yuan per yuan spent by the government. The large spending responses do not come from substitution away from non-targeted spending categories or from short-run intertemporal substitution. We conclude that digital coupons are a cost-effective way to provide targeted fiscal stimulus to specific sectors of the economy.
Improving State Effectiveness by Discouraging Civil Servants from Flattering Their Leaders
Alain de Janvry, Guojun He, Elisabeth Sadoulet, Shaoda Wang, Qiong Zhang, Mar 11, 2020Evaluation of public employees performance is essential to induce higher work efforts. We use an experiment in two provinces of china to explore how to design such evaluation. Results show that the incentive effect of evaluation can be larger if the employee does not know ex-ante who the evaluator will be, thus reducing attempts at personally influencing the evaluator and enhancing instead job achievements.
Human Mobility Restrictions and the Spread of the Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in China
Hanming Fang, Long Wang, Yang Yang, Jun 03, 2020We provide a rigorous examination of the causal impact of human mobility restrictions, particularly the lockdown of the city of Wuhan on January 23, 2020, on the containment and delay of the spread of the Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in China. We employ various difference-in-differences strategies to disentangle the lockdown effect on human mobility reductions from other confounding effects, including a panic effect, a virus deterrence effect, and a Spring Festival effect...
