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Rising Intergenerational Income Persistence in China

Yi Fan, Junjian Yi, Junsen Zhang, Jul 04, 2018

Although studies on economic inequality and intergenerational mobility have gained traction in the last decade, little is known about the temporal changes in the intergenerational association of economic status, especially in developing and transitional economies. We find an increasing pattern in intergenerational income persistence across China’s transitional period. To promote intergenerational mobility, the Chinese government should continue to remove rural-urban migration barriers and initiate various programs to subsidize the education of children from disadvantaged families, known as the “left-behind” children.

Notching R&D Investment with Corporate Income Tax Cuts in China

Zhao Chen, Zhikuo Liu, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, Daniel Yi Xu, Aug 16, 2017

To encourage innovation, the Chinese government gave tax incentives to firms whose R&D intensity (as measured by the ratio of R&D expenditures over total sales) exceeds a threshold that varies by their total sales. Using a major corporate tax reform in 2008, Professor Daniel Yi Xu from Duke University and his coauthors provide empirical evidence for some "strategic" behavior — including some relabeling of administrative expenditures as R&D — by the firms to take advantage of the tax incentives.

Chinese Corporate Credit Ratings: Comparing Global and Domestic Agencies

Xianfeng Jiang, Frank Packer, Dec 06, 2017

When comparing the credit ratings of domestic and global agencies on Chinese corporations, because of the differences in ratings scales, it is best to focus on the domestic and global agency orderings of relative credit risk. Testing for differences in the determinants of ratings, we find that asset size is weighed more heavily as a positive factor by domestic agencies, while profitability and state-ownership are weighed more positively by global rating agencies, which also weigh leverage more heavily as a negative factor. In spite of these differences, both domestic and global ratings appear to be priced into the market values of rated bonds.

Understanding the Chinese Stock Market: Long-term Performance and Institutional Reforms

Franklin Allen, Jun Qian, Chenyu Shan, Lei Zhu, Jul 05, 2017

The Chinese economy had spectacular growth in the past three decades, however the Chinese stock market had the worst performance among the major stock markets. Professor Franklin Allen from Imperial College, Professor Jun Qian from Fanhai International School of Finance, Fudan University, and coauthors offer their explanation of this puzzling divergence.

Evidence of Precautionary Savings in China

Hui He, Feng Huang, Zheng Liu, Dongming Zhu, Sep 05, 2018

China’s household savings rate has been persistently high since the early 1980s despite rapid economic growth and contrary to the predictions of the standard consumption theory. Since China has undergone large structural changes in its transition to a market economy, precautionary savings seem to be a plausible contributing factor to the high savings rate. We use China’s large-scale reform of State-owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the late 1990s as a natural experiment to identify exogenous changes in income uncertainty. We estimate that precautionary savings account for about 40 percent of SOE households’ wealth accumulation from 1995 to 2002.