This paper provides evidence of heterogeneous human-capital externality using CHIP 2002, 2007, and 2013 data from urban China. After instrumenting city-level education using the number of relocated university departments across cities in the 1950s, one additional year of city-level education increases individual hourly wages by 22.0 percent, more than twice the OLS estimate. Human-capital externality is greater for all groups of urban residents in the instrumental variables estimation.
This paper shows that the most efficient way for China to fulfill its committed import purchases from the United States under the Phase One trade agreement is to mimic the effect of an import subsidy. The effective subsidies would divert China’s agricultural imports from other countries. We find that this trade diversion is especially strong for Australia and Canada, followed by Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
A key foundation of Chinese-style institutions is that different levels of government control resources and utilize their power to support businesses connected to them. Professors Haoyuan Ding of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Haichao Fan of Fudan University, and Shu Lin of the Chinese University of Hong Kong develop a theoretical model and present supporting empirical evidence to show how this institutional feature affects firm exports in China. In particular, they find that political connection has a positive effect on export in industries that heavily rely on external finance and contracting environment, but a negative effect on export in other industries.
Recent IMF research explores the effectiveness of credit in supporting the Chinese economy, and compares it with the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus. The study finds that credit contributed positively to output growth in China in the early 2000s, but the effect fell to almost zero post-2010. This suggests that, at present, credit cannot effectively support further growth of the Chinese economy. In contrast, the estimated fiscal multiplier is 1.4 post-2010, which is high in international and historic comparisons. Therefore, a targeted fiscal stimulus can cushion the adjustment of the Chinese economy to lower credit growth.
BigTech firms, i.e. large technology firms whose primary business is digital services, are entering finance. Their entry into finance started with payments. Increasingly, they have expanded beyond payments into the provision of credit, insurance, and toward savings products, either directly or in partnership with incumbent financial institutions...