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The Anatomy of Chinese Innovation: Insights on Patent Quality and Ownership

Philipp Boeing, Loren Brandt, Ruochen Dai, Kevin Lim, Bettina Peters, May 07, 2025

Chinese patenting has become narrower and less innovative over time. The role of overseas knowledge has also declined sharply. These findings are salient in the context of a marked slowdown in economic growth in China and rising concerns of technological decoupling with the US.

Understanding the Evolution of China’s Production and Trade Patterns

Hanwei Huang, Jiandong Ju, Vivian Yue, Oct 09, 2024

The article discusses how capital accumulation has driven China's transition towards capital-intensive industries, while labor-biased productivity growth has helped China maintain a competitive edge in labor-intensive sectors.

Are the Most Aggressive Investors in China Actually Informed?

Christian T. Lundblad, Zhishu Yang, Qi Zhang, Aug 30, 2017

Using a unique Chinese data set capturing the trading behavior of particularly aggressive investors, we provide new evidence that is consistent with the presence of informational advantages. Critically, an advantage of our data is that we can also directly identify several plausible channels through which such an informational advantage could arise. Specifically, return predictability around key value-relevant events is most pronounced in the presence of aggressive traders who share the same geographic location as the firms in which they trade.

Accounting for Urban China’s Rising Income Inequality: The Roles of the Labor Market, Human Capital, and Marriage Market Factors

Shuaizhang Feng, Gaojie Tang, Mar 27, 2019

China has witnessed persistent increases in economic inequality since the early 1990s when the urban labor market began its transformation — from centrally-controlled to market-driven. Using the Urban Household Survey data, this paper (Feng and Tang, 2018) documents the trends...

The Dynamic Effects of Computerized VAT Invoices on Chinese Manufacturing Firms

Haichao Fan, Yu Liu, Nancy Qian, Jaya Wen, Aug 08, 2018

This investigation uses a balanced panel of large manufacturing firms to provide novel evidence on the dynamic effects of computerizing VAT invoices on tax revenues and firm behavior in China, 1998-2007. We find that computerization increases cumulative VAT revenues and increases the effective average tax rate. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that the effects of computerization change over time: tax revenue gains are likely to be smaller in the long run. Meanwhile, firms reduce output and input, and increase productivity monotonically over time.