A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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Building Tall, Falling Short: An Empirical Assessment of Chinese Skyscrapers
Ziyang Chen, Ting Chen, Yatang Lin, Jin Wang, Jun 04, 2025Amid debates around state-led urbanization in developing countries, we analyze the causes and consequences of China’s skyscraper boom. We find that local governments often subsidize these projects through discounted land prices, motivated by political incentives. However, we find that such subsidies offer minimal long-term benefits, largely due to a mismatch with local conditions.
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...
Foreign Business Exposure, Policy Uncertainty, and Capital Flight from Home: Evidence from China
Dongxu Li, Xiaoxue Hu, Sep 22, 2021Using subsidiary-level data of 3,863 Chinese nonfinancial firms from 2000 to 2019, we show that the multinationals have 5.3% higher capital expenditures than the domestic firms relative to the average. The multinational firms’ offshore investment increases with policy uncertainty about the domestic markets. Our analysis suggests that in the face of domestic uncertainty, multinational firms switch to...
Why Are So Many Young Women Moving to China’s Big Cities?
Yumi Koh, Jing Li, Yifan Wu, Junjian Yi, Hanzhe Zhang, Dec 03, 2025It’s not just about jobs. It’s also about love, status, and the marriage market.
Peer Effects, Political Competition, and Ecological Efficiency
Xudong Chen, Bihong Huang, Yantuan Yu, Jul 29, 2020This study examines the impacts of political competition on eco-efficiency. We first develop a theoretical model in which local government officials compete against each other to maximize their own political score. We find that after an initial stage of decline, eco-efficiency eventually increases once environmental performance becomes a meaningful component of local government officials’ annual assessment. These theoretical predictions are corroborated...
