This study documents women’s declining relative wages and labor force participation in China over the last two decades, in contrast with the predictions of the structural transformation literature, suggesting that rising service sector share is associated with narrowing gender gaps. We show that women’s labor supply elasticity to spouse’s wages increased dramatically between 1995 and 2013, which is consistent with a U-shaped relationship between economic development and women’s...
Residential investment has been a key growth engine for China in the last two decades. Total housing investment grew from about 4 percent of GDP in 1997 to a peak of 15 percent of GDP in 2014, with residential investment accounting for more than two-thirds of it. Our analysis indicates that structural changes in the Chinese economy that led to rebalancing toward consumption...
In a 2019 survey jointly administered by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) and the PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua University (Tsinghua PBCSF), more than 90% of Chinese public firms report that they closely monitor the stock market for the purposes of learning information to guide real investment decisions and of accessing external financing. These findings provide direct evidence for the wide existence of market feedback via a learning channel and a financing channel, suggesting that the Chinese stock market is not just a side show, but instead, affects the real economy.
Using big data of more than 100 million posted jobs from China, we estimate how the COVID-19 pandemic affected local labor demand in China via global supply chains. The data reveal that the number of newly posted jobs was about 31% lower in the first 14 weeks after the Wuhan lockdown than comparable periods in 2018 and 2019. We show that COVID-19 cases abroad and foreign governments’ pandemic-control policies reduced new job creation in China by 11.7%...
Financial regulation can have unanticipated consequences in the financial system. The evidence from China’s interbank market shows that banks tend to use newly introduced and lightly regulated financial instruments to get around regulation during their search for funds. Banks facing greater competition or higher liquidity shortages have more incentives to engage in such activities. Such interbank activities are closely associated with banks’ proprietary trading, suggesting the potential risk of financial contagion.