China has become a world leader in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), a data-intensive technology with the potential to transform the global economy. We argue that the Chinese state’s collection of data and provision of data to commercial firms contribute to China’s AI leadership. We provide supportive evidence from China’s facial recognition AI sector and develop a macroeconomic model that illustrates how the Chinese state's surveillance interest aligns with promoting AI innovation, but potentially at the expense of privacy.
In China’s corporate bond market, the yield spread of newly issued bonds at their first secondary-market trade is on average 5.35 bps higher than the issuance spread. This overpricing is robust across bond issuances with different credit ratings, maturities, issuance types, and issuer status. Evidence suggests that competition among underwriters drives this overpricing through two specific channels—either through rebates to participants in issuance auctions or through direct auction bidding by the underwriters for themselves or their clients.
We document a process of rapid tertiarization of the Chinese economy since 2005. We estimate total factor productivity through different methodologies and find that productivity has increased faster in services than in the manufacturing sector in recent years.
We study the urbanization process in China during the past decade by deconstructing different sources of new urban residents. We find that around one-third of urban population growth in the past decade has consisted of redefined migrants from communities that have been reclassified from rural to urban, though they do not actually move. We further find evidence that failing to consider the number of redefined migrants and their housing behaviors leads to a high housing vacancy rate in China’s urban areas.
Zombie firms are insolvent firms that continue to operate due to continued access to financing at extremely low costs. Nie et al. (2016) find that in the year 2013 about 14 percent of Chinese-listed firms and 7.5 percent of Chinese manufacturing firms are defined as zombie firms. The large amount of financing subsidies distributed to insolvent zombie firms...