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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.

The Economic Toll of China’s Tutoring Ban

Zibin Huang, Yinan Liu, Mingming Ma, Leo Yang Yang, Aug 27, 2025

China's 2021 “Double Reduction'' policy, which banned for-profit K12 academic tutoring, triggered an abrupt contraction in the education-services labor market. Using real-time job-posting and firm-registration data, we estimate over three million job openings lost in four months and at least 11 billion RMB in value-added tax (VAT) revenue losses within 18 months, alongside unintended negative spillovers to untargeted arts and sports training.

Centralization or Decentralization? The Evolution of State-Ownership in China

Franklin Allen, Junhui Cai, Xian Gu, Jun Qian, Linda Zhao, Wu Zhu, Apr 05, 2023

We developed an SOE index for all 40 million firms in China from 1990 to 2017 based on the dynamic EquiNet. This quantitative index is solely based on equity investments and thus clears up the mysteries of other self-report measures.

Economic Growth — in the World and in China

Robert J. Barro, Jul 12, 2017

Convergence forces suggest that China’s per capita GDP growth rate will decline gradually from around 7% per year to the world’s historical average of 2%. In the past, this convergence tendency was more than offset by China’s opening to markets, improved legal institutions and business regulations, increased investment rates, higher life expectancy, and reduced fertility—but the convergence force will ultimately dominate.

E-Commerce Integration and Economic Development: Evidence from China

Victor Couture, Benjamin Faber, Yizhen Gu, Lizhi Liu, Apr 11, 2018

In our recent work (Couture et al., 2018), we combine an experiment that we implement across Chinese villages with a new collection of survey and administrative microdata to provide evidence on the potential of e-commerce integration to foster economic development in the countryside. We also explore the underlying channels and the distribution of the gains from e-commerce across households and villages.