A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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Pricing the Priceless: The Financing Cost of Biodiversity Conservation
Fukang Chen, Minhao Chen, Lin William Cong, Haoyu Gao, Jacopo Ponticelli, Feb 26, 2025This study investigates the pricing of financial risks associated with biodiversity conservation, with a particular focus on the Green Shield Action, a major regulatory initiative launched in China in 2017 to enforce biodiversity preservation rules in national nature reserves. While the initiative improved biodiversity, it also significantly increased bond yields for municipalities that are home to these reserves, effectively raising the general cost of public capital. These effects were primarily driven by heightened default risks plausibly caused by transition costs from shutting down illegal economic activities within the reserves and additional public spending on biodiversity conservation, even when local governments raise the same amount of money. Furthermore, the study reveals that the biological benefits of these conservation policies were not adequately recognized or impounded into the prices by the capital markets.
Environmental Externalities, Product Attributes, and Market Power: Implications for Government Subsidies
Panle Jia Barwick, Hyuk-soo Kwon, Shanjun Li, Sep 18, 2024The 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.
Cash in the Darkness
Haohan Ren, Kemin Wang, Bohui Zhang, Fan Zhang, Jan 12, 2024Relying 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.
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.
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.
