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Does VAT Have Higher Tax Compliance Than a Turnover Tax? Evidence from China

Jianjun Li, Xuan Wang, Jan 15, 2020

We study the effects of compliance with the value-added tax (VAT) by exploiting the reform that replaced business tax (BT) with VAT in China beginning in 2012. We find that replacing the BT with VAT significantly increases the reported sales and costs for treated firms, and the impact is much stronger for business-to-business (B2B) transactions than for business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions. Buyers in B2B transactions...

Pushing on a String: State-Owned Enterprises and Monetary Policy Transmission in China

Peter Tillmann, Hongyi Chen, Apr 18, 2018

In China, a large share of enterprises is state-owned and has preferential access to finances. This should affect the way the economy responds to changes in monetary policy. We find that a policy easing is more effective than a policy tightening – which is consistent with the PBC being able to “push on a string”.

China’s Rebalancing: Recent Progress, Prospects, and Policies

Rui C. Mano, Jiayi Zhang, Mar 20, 2019

While China’s growth gathered momentum in 2017, rebalancing was uneven and decelerated along many dimensions reflecting the temporary factors behind the growth pickup. Going forward, rebalancing is expected to proceed as these temporary factors recede, but elevated income inequality and leverage will remain a challenge. The authorities are...

Corporate Innovation and IPO Interventions

Lin William Cong, Sabrina T. Howell, May 20, 2020

The Chinese government has occasionally suspended IPOs, exogenously creating uncertainty about access to public markets for firms already approved to list. We show that suspension-induced delay reduces corporate innovation activity both during the delay and for years after listing.

The Data Privacy Paradox of Alipay Users

Long Chen, Yadong Huang, Shumiao Ouyang, Wei Xiong, Jul 07, 2021

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.