The article discusses how house prices have affected China's birth rate and explores the implications for the country's housing market and demographic future.
When comparing the credit ratings of domestic and global agencies on Chinese corporations, because of the differences in ratings scales, it is best to focus on the domestic and global agency orderings of relative credit risk. Testing for differences in the determinants of ratings, we find that asset size is weighed more heavily as a positive factor by domestic agencies, while profitability and state-ownership are weighed more positively by global rating agencies, which also weigh leverage more heavily as a negative factor. In spite of these differences, both domestic and global ratings appear to be priced into the market values of rated bonds.
China’s household savings rate has been persistently high since the early 1980s despite rapid economic growth and contrary to the predictions of the standard consumption theory. Since China has undergone large structural changes in its transition to a market economy, precautionary savings seem to be a plausible contributing factor to the high savings rate. We use China’s large-scale reform of State-owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the late 1990s as a natural experiment to identify exogenous changes in income uncertainty. We estimate that precautionary savings account for about 40 percent of SOE households’ wealth accumulation from 1995 to 2002.
China’s real estate market has been a key engine of its sustained economic expansion. This paper argues, however, that even before the COVID-19 shock, a decades-long housing boom had given rise to price misalignments and regional supply-demand mismatches, making an adjustment both necessary and inevitable. Based on input-output analysis and benchmarking against other economies, we estimate the size of China’s real estate–related activities to be 29% of the economy and conclude that the sector is quite vulnerable to a sustained aggregate growth shock.
The Chinese economy had spectacular growth in the past three decades, however the Chinese stock market had the worst performance among the major stock markets. Professor Franklin Allen from Imperial College, Professor Jun Qian from Fanhai International School of Finance, Fudan University, and coauthors offer their explanation of this puzzling divergence.