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Evidence of Precautionary Savings in China

Hui He, Feng Huang, Zheng Liu, Dongming Zhu, Sep 05, 2018

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.

Daily Price Limits and the Magnet Effect

Ting Chen, Zhenyu Gao, Jibao He, Wenxi Jiang, Wei Xiong, Oct 25, 2017

We find that the widely adopted daily price limit rules may induce large investors as a group to pursue a destructive trading strategy of pushing stock prices to the upper price limit and then profiting from selling these stocks on the next day. Their trading accelerates the price increase on the day that the upper price limit is reached, thus leading to the so-called Magnet Effect. This unintended effect renders the daily price limits — a market stabilization scheme — counterproductive.

Industry/Policy View Assessing China’s Financial Risk: Evidence from the Stock Market

Hao Zhou, Haibin Zhu, Xiangpeng Chen, Jul 14, 2017

VoxChina welcomes views from industry reports and policy reports.This piece summaries the views about China’s financial risk from - Hao Zhou, the PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua University, Haibin Zhu, J.P. Morgan and Xiangpeng Chen, the PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua University.

China’s “Great Leap Forward” in Science and Engineering

Richard B. Freeman, Jun 20, 2017

From "Made in China" to "Innovated in China" can occur only if China produces a large number of scientists and engineers. Richard B. Freeman of Harvard University documents China's "Great Leap Forward" in science and engineering in the past decades in the number of engineers and scientists, the number of scientific papers, patents and innovations.

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.