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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, 2022

China’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.

Cash in the Darkness

Haohan Ren, Kemin Wang, Bohui Zhang, Fan Zhang, Jan 12, 2024

Relying on a large dataset on cash withdrawals of over 165 million bank cards from China, we find a higher ratio of cash withdrawals late at night is associated with criminal activity.

What Gets Measured Gets Managed: Investment and the Cost of Capital

Zhiguo He, Guanmin Liao, Baolian Wang, Aug 09, 2023

To improve capital allocative efficiency, starting in 2010, Chinese regulators switched from using return on equity to economic value added (EVA).

Superstition Everywhere

Jinfan Zhang, Huancheng Du, Mar 09, 2022

In 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.

Environmental Externalities, Product Attributes, and Market Power: Implications for Government Subsidies

Panle Jia Barwick, Hyuk-soo Kwon, Shanjun Li, Sep 18, 2024

The article discusses how attribute-based subsidy (ABS) designs lead to higher product quality and more effectively mitigate market power than uniform subsidies, albeit with a modest environmental cost.