A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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How China’s Business Registration Reform Boosted Entrepreneurship and Productivity
Panle Jia Barwick, Luming Chen, Shanjun Li, Xiaobo Zhang, Nov 05, 2025China’s 2014 business registration reform spurred greater market dynamism by lowering entry barriers, which increased firm turnover and allowed smaller yet more productive entrepreneurs to establish new businesses, boosting overall productivity and growth.
Investor Memory and Biased Beliefs: Evidence from the Field
Zhengyang Jiang, Hongqi Liu, Cameron Peng, Hongjun Yan, Aug 20, 2025We explore how investor memory drives belief formation and trading behavior, fueling financial market volatility. Drawing on surveys of over 17,000 Chinese retail investors linked to trading records, our study finds that recollections of past returns—shaped by both salient market events in the past and current market conditions—strongly influence expectations of future returns and investors’ portfolio choices, often outweighing objective historical data. These findings suggest that memory-driven biases amplify boom-and-bust cycles, with policy implications for improving market stability by counteracting distorted recall.
A New Method for Estimating Product-Level Emission Intensities and Implications for EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism
Ohyun Kwon, Hao Zhao, Min Qiang Zhao, May 14, 2025We develop a new method for estimating product-level emission intensities (PLEI) by combining firm-level emissions with firm-product output data. This methodological innovation produces highly granular emission measures that are essential for both academic research and climate policy design. Applying the method to Chinese manufacturing data, we uncover stark heterogeneity: the top 10% of emission-intensive products account for 75% of emissions but only 4% of exports. We incorporate our PLEI estimates into a general equilibrium trade model to assess the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). Our simulations demonstrate that, at the same carbon price, product-level CBAM achieves substantially greater emissions reductions than sector-level CBAM, while causing markedly less trade disruption. These results underscore the importance of product-level emission intensity data in designing targeted and cost-effective climate policies.
Input Trade Liberalization and Firm Labor Market Power in China
Illenin O. Kondo, Yao Amber Li, Wei Qian, Jul 30, 2025More trade, more jobs? Or fewer? China’s accession to the WTO has catalyzed a rich research agenda on the labor market consequences of trade liberalization. Departing from the assumptions of perfectly competitive labor markets, we ask whether Chinese firms exercised more or less labor market power when input tariffs fell with China’s WTO accession? We show that input trade liberalization reduced labor monopsony power in China, especially for skill-intensive firms and in markets with more labor supply growth.
The Rise of China as an International Lender
Zhengyang Jiang, Dec 16, 2025In the past decade, China has become the largest creditor to developing countries, surpassing the IMF, World Bank, and Paris Club countries. This column discusses how China's overseas lending interacts with US monetary policy – another key driver of the global financial cycle. It finds that Chinese and US policies jointly influence the level and the distribution of risk exposures in developing countries. As a result of China's expanding role in international lending, the architecture of global financial intermediation is also undergoing a fundamental transformation, carrying important implications for the stability and functioning of the international monetary system.
