A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
Facebook 
Twitter 
Instagram
WeChat 
Email Most Popular
The Effect of Pollution and Heat on the Productivity of High-Skill Public Sector Workers in China
Matthew E. Kahn, Pei Li, May 22, 2019The quality of governance depends on public sector worker productivity. We use micro data from China to document that judges are less productive on polluted days. We find that public sector productivity elasticities are larger than the published estimates of private sector productivity elasticities with respect to pollution.
What You Import Matters for Productivity Growth: Experience from Chinese Manufacturing Firms
Jiawei Mo, Larry D. Qiu, Hongsong Zhang, Xiaoyu Dong, Dec 22, 2021We find that capital import has a substantially larger productivity effect than intermediates import, by generating significant long-term productivity gains through R&D-capital synergy, R&D-inducing, and direct dynamic productivity effects. Our findings highlight the importance of tariff structure in tariff liberalization: the change in tariff structure explains 18% of the productivity gains following China’s WTO accession.
Magnification of the “China Shock” Through the U.S. Housing Market
Yuan Xu, Hong Ma, Robert Feenstra, Jan 22, 2020The “China shock” operated in part through the U.S. housing market, which is one important reason the China shock was as big as it was. If housing prices had not responded at all to the China shock, then the total employment effect would have been reduced by more than one-half. Even when fully recognizing that housing prices responded to the China shock, the independent employment effect of the China shock is still reduced by around 30%.
Debt Management and Strategic Interactions in Top-down Bureaucracy: Evidence from China
Xi Qu, Zhiwei Xu, Jinxiang Yu, Apr 30, 2025The Chinese central government implemented a series of measures to establish a top-to-bottom debt ceiling management system starting in 2015. Under this regulatory framework, public debt issuance for a prefecture city is subject to a ceiling (quota) determined through a hierarchical procedure. Based on a comprehensive dataset, we investigate what factors determine the allocations of debt ceiling to prefectural cities in China after the debt management reform. We find that the distributional outcome of the debt ceilings relies on the bilateral interactions of local and their superior governments. We also estimate the effect of ceiling allocation on the real economy, as well as the potential risk associated with implicit debt accumulation.
Feedback Trading and the Chinese Put Warrants Bubble
Neil D. Pearson, Zhishu Yang, Qi Zhang, Jul 27, 2022There was a bubble in the prices of put warrants traded on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges during the summer of 2007. We use investor trading records from a large securities firm to show that put warrant investors engaged in a particular form of feedback trading. This feedback trading exacerbated an initial run-up in put warrant prices caused by a change in the stock transaction tax, and created the bubble.
