Exploiting the staggered rollout, since 2014, of judicial independence reform that removed local governments’ control over local courts’ financial and personnel decisions in China, we show that judicial independence can reduce local protectionism and foster cross-regional economic integration.
China’s remarkable economic rise over the past three decades has yielded many benefits to its own citizens and to people all around the globe. But the export-led growth model that underpinned China’s success and its increased role in the global economy has also led over time to the development of some serious imbalances in its economy. How China deals with these imbalances will have important implications for the rest of the world going forward—in particular, the quantitative analysis reported here suggests that were China to experience a financial crisis, the hit to the rest of the world would be substantial.
It has been widely argued that government bonds can be used as a reference point for pricing corporate bonds. This “reference” role can reduce the cost of corporate borrowing. The authors study this question by examining a unique experiment in China. China issued two sovereign bonds denominated in U.S. dollars (USD) in October 2017, the first...
To stimulate investment and promote production efficiency, the Chinese government has undertaken a series of value-added tax (VAT) reforms. One of those reforms, in 2009, reduced not only the purchasing price of equipment, but also investment frictions, i.e., the price gap imposed by the pre-reform VAT system between new and used equipment. We find that this reform increased equipment investment by 36%...
Can intermediate input trade liberalization affect worker health in a developing country like China, and if so, how? Do the impacts differ between skilled and unskilled workers? What are the welfare implications of input tariff reductions once health factors are considered? Professors Haichao Fan of Fudan University, Faqin Lin of China Agricultural University, and Shu Lin of the Chinese University of Hong Kong develop...