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Human-Capital Externalities in China

Edward L. Glaeser, Ming Lu, Oct 10, 2024

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.

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 Do Zombie Firms Affect Innovation? Evidence from China’s Industrial Firms

Yun Dai, Wei Li, Yongqin Wang, May 08, 2019

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...

The COVID-19 Pandemic and Job Creation: The Role of Global Supply Chains

Hanming Fang, Chunmian Ge, Hanwei Huang, Hongbin Li, Dec 30, 2020

Using big data of more than 100 million posted jobs from China, we estimate how the COVID-19 pandemic affected local labor demand in China via global supply chains. The data reveal that the number of newly posted jobs was about 31% lower in the first 14 weeks after the Wuhan lockdown than comparable periods in 2018 and 2019. We show that COVID-19 cases abroad and foreign governments’ pandemic-control policies reduced new job creation in China by 11.7%...

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.