Most Popular

Impacts of Housing Policy: China’s Experiment

Kaiji Chen, Qing Wang, Tong Xu, Tao Zha, Jan 13, 2021

China’s unprecedented and unexpected loosening of loan-to-value ratio (LTV) policy during 2014Q4–2016Q3 provides an ideal case to study the role of housing policy in housing booms and busts and its impacts on consumption and debt burdens among households. Evidence from three unique micro datasets shows that such a policy change disproportionately increased the share of mortgages to middle-aged and high-income homeowners in the total amount of newly issued mortgages and at the same time reduced their consumption growth...

How Rural Pensions Boosted China's Economy

Qingen Gai, Naijia Guo, Bingjing Li, Qinghua Shi, Xiaodong Zhu, Dec 31, 2025

China’s New Rural Pension Scheme unexpectedly lowered the high cost of migration by freeing younger workers from household duties – boosting migration, wages, household welfare, and even national GDP.

No Winners but Only Losers in the China-US Trade War

Marlene Amstad, Leonardo Gambacorta, Chao He, Dora Xia, Mar 31, 2021

Trade tensions between China and the United States have played an important role in swinging global stock markets, but the effects are difficult to quantify. Using a comprehensive database constructed by Wisers, we develop a novel trade sentiment index (TSI) based on textual analysis that assesses the positive or negative tone of Chinese media coverage of the China-US trade situation and evaluates the TSI’s capacity to...

Accounting for Urban China’s Rising Income Inequality: The Roles of the Labor Market, Human Capital, and Marriage Market Factors

Shuaizhang Feng, Gaojie Tang, Mar 27, 2019

China has witnessed persistent increases in economic inequality since the early 1990s when the urban labor market began its transformation — from centrally-controlled to market-driven. Using the Urban Household Survey data, this paper (Feng and Tang, 2018) documents the trends...

The Two-Pillar Policy for the RMB from December 2015 to May 2017

Urban J. Jermann, Bin Wei, Vivian Yue, Aug 16, 2017

We document that since December 2015 the People’s Bank of China (PBC) has followed a “two-pillar” exchange rate policy that aims to achieve both stability and flexibility. Based on a no-arbitrage model and options price data we estimate the credibility of the policy as well as its impact on the RMB/USD exchange rate. The model was able to correctly forecast the end of the two-pillar policy in May 2017.