Most Popular

Price Discovery and Market Segmentation in China’s Credit Market

Zhe Geng, Jun Pan, Apr 08, 2020

The recent unprecedented wave of bond defaults in China has captured the attention of investors worldwide. We document a severe segmentation between the pricing of state-owned enterprise (SOE) and non-SOE bonds that arises sharply post 2018. Using our default measure, we find that this market segmentation is not driven by the fundamentals of the firms. We also show that this market segmentation has also caused...

FDI and Firm Productivity in Host Countries: The Role of Financial Constraints

Wontae Han, Jian Wang, Xiao Wang, Mar 03, 2021

Using the Chinese firm-level data, we find that FDI firms may have even lower cutoff productivity than local firms, although FDI firms are still, on average, more productive than their local counterparts. In addition, these findings are more pronounced in financially more vulnerable sectors. We argue that easy access to international financial markets by FDI firms has played an important role in driving our empirical findings...

Improving State Effectiveness by Discouraging Civil Servants from Flattering Their Leaders

Alain de Janvry, Guojun He, Elisabeth Sadoulet, Shaoda Wang, Qiong Zhang, Mar 11, 2020

Evaluation of public employees performance is essential to induce higher work efforts. We use an experiment in two provinces of china to explore how to design such evaluation. Results show that the incentive effect of evaluation can be larger if the employee does not know ex-ante who the evaluator will be, thus reducing attempts at personally influencing the evaluator and enhancing instead job achievements.

Data, Collateral, and Implications for the Credit Cycle

Leonardo Gambacorta, Yiping Huang, Zhenhua Li, Han Qiu, Dec 09, 2020

The use of massive amounts of data by large technology firms (big techs) to assess firms’ creditworthiness could reduce the need for collateral in credit markets. Using a unique dataset of more than 2 million Chinese firms that received credit from both an important big tech firm (Ant Group) and traditional commercial banks, we find that a greater use of big tech...

Finance Leases: A Hidden Channel of China’s Shadow Banking System

Jinfan Zhang, Ting Yang, Yanping Shi, Nov 11, 2020

We find that banks use their affiliated leasing firms to provide credit to constrained clients in order to circumvent the government’s targeted monetary tightening policy, which offsets the expected decline in traditional bank loans in overcapacity industries and hampers the effectiveness of the monetary policy. Although this regulatory arbitrage may cause systemic risk at the macro level, bank-affiliated leasing firms...