A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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Mortgage Prepayment in China
Zhenyu Gao, Wenxi Jiang, Haohan Ren, Kemin Wang, Yuezhi Wu, Sep 10, 2025During the 2019–2024 monetary easing cycle, Chinese households used their savings to prepay unprecedented amounts of mortgage loans. Because refinancing was restricted, mortgage rates remained rigid, while savings returns quickly adjusted to rate cuts. The widening gap between borrowing costs and savings returns encouraged prepayment (deleveraging) and reduced consumption. Our findings suggest that the rigid mortgage rates have rendered China’s monetary easing counterproductive.
Opening Up in the 21st Century: A Quantitative Accounting of Chinese Export Growth
Loren Brandt, Kevin Lim, Apr 12, 2023China’s rapid export growth has spurred extensive research investigating its effects on other economies. However, the exact causes of the boom as well as the slowdown in Chinese exporting after 2007 are less well understood.
Throwing Good Money after Bad: Zombie Lending and the Supply Chain Contagion of Firm Exit
Yun Dai, Xuchao Li, Dinghua Liu, Jiankun Lu, Jan 19, 2022Zombie 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
Foreign-Invested Enterprises and the Transmission of Global Financial Uncertainty: Evidence from China
Shujie Wu, Haichun Ye, Jul 21, 2021How 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...
Empowered Young Women: Trade Liberalization and Women’s Family Decisions in China
Difei Ouyang, Weidi Yuan, Yuan Zi, Mar 08, 2023How 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.
