A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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China’s New Goal for Income Distribution: What Does it Mean and are There Tradeoffs?
Martin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen, Mar 16, 2022China’s political leadership recently committed to expanding the proportion of middle-income groups to create a less polarised, and more ‘olive-shaped’, distribution of wealth. This column considers the potential trade-offs between reducing income polarisation and other goals, including poverty reduction.
Let a Small Bank Fail: Implicit Non-guarantee and Financial Contagion
Liyuan Liu, Xianshuang Wang, Zhen Zhou, Nov 27, 2024The research findings indicate that after the failure of a small bank, regulatory authorities did not fully bail out all creditors as had been the norm, and this policy shift affected the funding costs and market confidence of banks with lower systemic importance (SU).
Interest rates and exchange rates when the money supply goes up
Saleem Bahaj, Ricardo Reis, May 21, 2025The power of monetary policy to affect interest rates and exchange rates depends on the downward slope of the demand function. This column uses the Chinese experiment with parallel currencies to study the impact of sudden increases in money supply. The authors find causal evidence that increases in money supply lead to currency depreciations, and use this to quantify the interest elasticity of reserve demand. The results can be used to understand how the People’s Bank of China maintained the peg between the mainland and parallel currencies.
Homemade Foreign Trading
Zhiguo He, Yuehan Wang, Xiaoquan Zhu, Jul 26, 2023Our recent study provides evidence that Chinese mainland insiders tend to evade see-through surveillance by round-tripping via the Stock Connect program.
Superstition Everywhere
Jinfan Zhang, Huancheng Du, Mar 09, 2022In Chinese culture, digit 8 (4) is taken as lucky (unlucky). We find that the numerological superstition has a profound impact across China’s stock, bond and foreign exchange markets, affecting asset prices in both the primary and secondary markets. The superstition effect, i.e., the probability of asset price ending with a lucky (unlucky) digit far exceeds (falls short of) what would be expected by chance, is everywhere.
