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Industry/Policy View Banking Across Borders: Are Chinese Banks Different?

Eugenio Cerutti, Cathérine Koch, Swapan-Kumar Pradhan, Feb 24, 2021

Chinese banks have become the largest cross-border lenders to emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs). Despite their different ownership structure, their type of global reach resembles that of advanced economies’ (AE) banks, with distance to their borrowing EMDEs less of a barrier than that of other EMDE banks and more like U.S. or European banks. While bilateral trade, FDI, and portfolio investment...

A New Perspective on China’s Credit Boom

Kinda Hachem, Michael Zheng Song, Jun 20, 2017

What caused the enormous credit boom in China? This column by Kinda Hachem and Michael Song offers an unexpected explanation of stricter liquidity regulations on banks leading to a credit boom through competition between small and big banks and their heavy use of shadow banking investment instruments.

Subways and Road Congestion

Yizhen Gu, Chang Jiang, Junfu Zhang, Ben Zou, May 06, 2020

In our recent work (Gu et al., 2019), we combine a difference-in-differences approach with a novel road speed dataset from Baidu Maps to provide evidence on the effect of subways on road congestion. We explore heterogeneous effects with respect to road characteristics. Guided by a conceptual framework of transportation mode choices, we shed light on the welfare impact of subways, using Beijing as an example.

Omnia Juncta in Uno: Foreign Powers and Trademark Protection in Shanghai’s Concession Era

Laura Alfaro, Cathy Ge Bao, Maggie X. Chen, Junjie Hong, Claudia Steinwender, Jul 09, 2025

Trademarks, which identify the source of goods and services, account for the majority of intellectual property filings worldwide. We investigate how firms adapt to the introduction of trademark institutions by exploring a historical precedent: China’s trademark law of 1923, an unanticipated and disapproved response to end foreign privileges in China.

The Real Driver of China’s Growth: Internal Economic Reform

Trevor Tombe, Xiaodong Zhu, Apr 03, 2019

Many people have attributed China’ s growth since 2001 to its accession to WTO and the resulting rapid export expansion. We provide quantitative evidence showing that internal economic reform, not export expansion, was the real driver of China’ s growth in the period after 2001. We also show that there is still large potential growth from further internal reform in China.