Crowdfunding has become an important financing alternative for micro-entrepreneurship. We study to what extent bias toward local entrepreneurs is prevalent in crowdfunding markets, determine the main driving forces for such bias, and examine how crowdfunding platforms and policymakers can leverage these forces to stimulate micro-entrepreneurship. Even though online crowdfunding platforms are designed to overcome geographic barriers, we find evidence of strong local bias induced by both informational frictions and local preference, with the former being more important.
How are global financial uncertainty shocks transmitted across borders? What is the role of nonfinancial multinational companies in the cross-border shock transmission? Using Chinese firm-level data, we find that rising global financial uncertainty has a significantly larger contractionary effect on real investment for foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) than their local counterparts. The differential responses to global financial uncertainty are more pronounced for firms...
Zombie lending to downstream firms does not reduce the exit likelihood of upstream firms. Worse, it distorts efficiency-based firm exit in upstream industries. The exit distortion effect works through the trade credit chain and is more profound in industries with stricter financial constraints and tighter supply chain connections
This article summarizes a study of the economic and public health effects of the Health Code app in China. By exploiting the staggered implementation of this technology across 322 Chinese cities, this study finds that the Health Code app significantly reduced virus transmission and facilitated economic recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic. A macroeconomic susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR) model calibrated to the micro-level estimates shows...
How do women’s marriage and fertility decisions respond to trade liberalization? This column finds that Chinese prefectures more exposed to the US granting of permanent normal trade relations to China have experienced a relative increase in the fraction of unmarried young women and young women without children.