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Understanding the Chinese Stock Market: Long-term Performance and Institutional Reforms

Franklin Allen, Jun Qian, Chenyu Shan, Lei Zhu, Jul 05, 2017

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.

Notching R&D Investment with Corporate Income Tax Cuts in China

Zhao Chen, Zhikuo Liu, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, Daniel Yi Xu, Aug 16, 2017

To encourage innovation, the Chinese government gave tax incentives to firms whose R&D intensity (as measured by the ratio of R&D expenditures over total sales) exceeds a threshold that varies by their total sales. Using a major corporate tax reform in 2008, Professor Daniel Yi Xu from Duke University and his coauthors provide empirical evidence for some "strategic" behavior — including some relabeling of administrative expenditures as R&D — by the firms to take advantage of the tax incentives.

Peak China Housing?

Kenneth Rogoff, Yuanchen Yang, Sep 16, 2020

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.

Healthy Life Expectancy in China

Han Li, Katja Hanewald, Shang Wu, Dec 20, 2017

We predict and analyze provincial-level healthy life expectancy for 31 provinces of China in 2015. Using data from a wide range of countries, we construct a predictive regression model based on socioeconomic variables such as GDP per capita, health and education expenditures, and the number of hospital beds. We find substantial regional health disparities, with healthy life expectancy varying by up to 10 years between different provinces for both men and women.

How Do Family Planning Policies Reshape the Life of the Chinese Elderly?

Yi Chen, Hanming Fang, Sep 12, 2018

In our recent work (Chen and Fang, 2018), we evaluate the long-term consequences of China’s family planning policies on the quality of life of the Chinese elderly. We identify the causal impact by exploiting the provincial heterogeneity in implementing the “Later, Longer, Fewer” policies in the early 1970s. We estimate the causal effect on a set of outcomes, including support from children, consumption, and physical and mental health. We find that family planning has either no effect or a slightly positive effect on elderly parents’ physical health status; however, parents who are more exposed to family planning policies report significantly worse mental health.