In late 2015, the Chinese government launched a multi-year plan to reduce capacity in the coal and steel industries. Around the same time, producer price inflation in China started to pick up strongly after being trapped in negative territory for 4½ years. What is behind this broad reflation—cuts in coal and steel capacity or a strengthening of aggregate demand...
Following the four Trillion RMB fiscal stimulus in 2009, People's Bank of China tightened up its M2 supply. Kaiji Chen, Jue Ren and Zha Tao from Emory University and Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta explored how the banks reacted to the tightening of M2 supply by expanding shadow banking activities, and how the rapid growth of shadow banking in turn hampers the effectiveness of monetary policy.
We find that there is no relationship between the self-stated privacy concerns of a sample of Alipay users and their number of data-sharing authorizations with third-party mini-programs on Alipay. We explain this data privacy paradox by a curious finding that users with stronger privacy concerns tend to benefit more from using mini-programs, which further suggests that consumers may develop data privacy concerns as a by-product of the process of using digital applications, not because such concerns are innate.
We exploit the staggered rollout of China’s drug price zero-markup policy (ZMP) to study physician-induced demand in healthcare. Our results show that the drug expenses in the treatment hospitals dropped by 63 log points (47 percent) compared with those of the control group; however, the expenses for non-drug services were 28 log points (32 percent) higher in the treatment group than in the control group. Our results provide robust evidence for physician-induced demand.
Exploiting the staggered rollout, since 2014, of judicial independence reform that removed local governments’ control over local courts’ financial and personnel decisions in China, we show that judicial independence can reduce local protectionism and foster cross-regional economic integration.