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Misallocation of Managerial Talent in China’s Housing Boom

Yu Shi, Feb 20, 2019

The housing boom in China has raised great concerns about capital and credit misallocation. Recent research by IMF Economist Yu Shi finds that China’s imperfect financial market and regulations in the land market have also led to a misallocation of managerial talent, dampening productivity and growth in the non-real estate sectors. Productive managers in other sectors moved to the real estate sector...

Special Deals from Special Investors: The Rise of State-Connected Private Owners in China

Chong-En Bai, Chang-Tai Hsieh, Michael Zheng Song, Xin Wang, Feb 10, 2021

We document a hierarchy of private owners connected to the state through equity investment and a rapid expansion of this hierarchy over the past two decades. We build a model to show how the effects of a special deal from a state investor can be transmitted and amplified through the hierarchy. Our estimation suggests that the expansion in the span of state-connected private owners may have increased aggregate output of the private sector by 4.2% a year between 2000 and 2019.

Innovation versus imitation: Where all that Chinese R&D is going

Michael König, Zheng (Michael) Song, Kjetil Storesletten, Fabrizio Zilibotti, Jan 26, 2022

China is aiming to become a technological innovation powerhouse by 2050, with Premier Li Keqiang recently announcing an increase in R&D investments by 7% for the next five years. But greater R&D investment is no guarantee of success. This column examines the effects of R&D investments by Chinese firms on aggregate productivity and growth.

Finance Leases: A Hidden Channel of China’s Shadow Banking System

Jinfan Zhang, Ting Yang, Yanping Shi, Nov 11, 2020

We find that banks use their affiliated leasing firms to provide credit to constrained clients in order to circumvent the government’s targeted monetary tightening policy, which offsets the expected decline in traditional bank loans in overcapacity industries and hampers the effectiveness of the monetary policy. Although this regulatory arbitrage may cause systemic risk at the macro level, bank-affiliated leasing firms...

Picking Winners? Government Subsidies and Firm Productivity in China

Lee G. Branstetter, Guangwei Li, Mengjia Ren, Jun 21, 2023

We investigate the relationship between the allocation of government subsidies and total factor productivity for Chinese listed firms.