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Boosting Pension Enrollment and Household Consumption by Example: A field Experiment on Information Provision
Chong-En Bai, Wei Chi, Tracy Xiao Liu, Chao Tang, Jian Xu, Aug 18, 2021We conduct a large-scale field experiment in the Guangdong province of China to examine the effect of informing individuals about government pension programs on their pension enrollment decisions and household consumption. Our experimental findings show the effectiveness of combining concrete and personalized information in designing informational material as well as the importance of targeting the most responsive population during information delivery.
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, 2021We 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.
When Industrial Policy Meets Comparative Advantage: Lessons from “Made in China 2025”
Xiuping Hua, Yong Wang, Junjie Xia, Haochen Zhang, Jan 28, 2026In this paper, the authors contribute to this debate through the lens of a novel perspective: the congruence between firm’s factor input structures and local endowment structures.
Misallocation of Managerial Talent in China’s Housing Boom
Yu Shi, Feb 20, 2019The 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...
Finance Leases: A Hidden Channel of China’s Shadow Banking System
Jeffrey (Jinfan) Chang, Ting Yang, Yanping Shi, Nov 11, 2020We 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...
