We examine the effect of large-scale administrative reorganization in China, where counties are annexed into cities to accommodate urban growth.
Using 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...
To improve capital allocative efficiency, starting in 2010, Chinese regulators switched from using return on equity to economic value added (EVA).
Crowdfunding has become an important financing alternative for micro-entrepreneurship. We study to what extent bias toward local entrepreneurs is prevalent in crowdfunding markets, determine the main driving forces for such bias, and examine how crowdfunding platforms and policymakers can leverage these forces to stimulate micro-entrepreneurship. Even though online crowdfunding platforms are designed to overcome geographic barriers, we find evidence of strong local bias induced by both informational frictions and local preference, with the former being more important.
We explore the impact of wage offers on job applications, testing implications of the directed search model and trying to distinguish it from random search. We use a field experiment conducted on an online Chinese job board, with real jobs for which we randomly varied the wage offers across three ranges. We find that higher wage offers raise application rates overall, which is consistent with directed search...