A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
Facebook 
Twitter 
Instagram
WeChat 
Email Most Popular
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.
What Do a Billion Observations Say about Distance and Relationship Lending?
Haoyu Gao, Hong Ru, Xiaoguang Yang, Nov 07, 2018Using big data of the locations of bank branches and borrowers in China, we document a non-trivial amount of distant lending. The inter-firm network helps banks collect soft information which facilitates the distant lending. We also use novel data of monthly internal loan rating changes to directly measure soft information and find that banks have better soft information and predict delinquent events more accurately for borrowers connected via the inter-firm network.
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...
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.
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.
