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Opening Up in the 21st Century: A Quantitative Accounting of Chinese Export Growth

Loren Brandt, Kevin Lim, Apr 12, 2023

China’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.

Price Discovery and Market Segmentation in China’s Credit Market

Zhe Geng, Jun Pan, Apr 08, 2020

The recent unprecedented wave of bond defaults in China has captured the attention of investors worldwide. We document a severe segmentation between the pricing of state-owned enterprise (SOE) and non-SOE bonds that arises sharply post 2018. Using our default measure, we find that this market segmentation is not driven by the fundamentals of the firms. We also show that this market segmentation has also caused...

Pushing on a String: State-Owned Enterprises and Monetary Policy Transmission in China

Peter Tillmann, Hongyi Chen, Apr 18, 2018

In China, a large share of enterprises is state-owned and has preferential access to finances. This should affect the way the economy responds to changes in monetary policy. We find that a policy easing is more effective than a policy tightening – which is consistent with the PBC being able to “push on a string”.

Does External Monitoring from the Government Improve the Performance of State-Owned Enterprises?

Shengyu Li, Hongsong Zhang, Nov 03, 2021

We investigate the impact of external monitoring from the government on state-owned enterprise performance, using the variation in monitoring strength arising from a nationwide policy change and firms’ geographic location in China. We utilize a structural approach to estimate input prices and productivity separately at the firm level using commonly available production data. We show that...

High-Speed Rail and China's Electric Vehicle Adoption Miracle

Hanming Fang, Ming Li, Long Wang, Yang Yang, Mar 19, 2025

We investigate whether high-speed rail (HSR) connectivity influences electric vehicle (EV) adoption, using a quasi-natural experiment from China’s HSR expansion and several identification strategies. Our findings consistently show that, by alleviating range anxiety, the expansion of HSR can account for up to one third of the increase in EV market share and EV sales in China during our sample period from 2010 to 2023, with effects particularly pronounced in cities served by faster HSR lines. These results suggest that transportation infrastructure can play a complementary role in accelerating the transition to electric mobility.