Most Popular

Internal Capital Markets in Business Groups and the Propagation of Credit Supply Shocks

Yu Shi, Robert Townsend, Wu Zhu, Sep 25, 2019

Using business registry data from China, we show that internal capital markets in business groups can propagate corporate shareholders' credit supply shocks to their subsidiaries. An average of 16.7% local bank credit growth where corporate shareholders are located would increase subsidiaries investment by 1% of their tangible fixed asset value, which accounts for 71% (7%) of the median (average) investment rate among these firms...

Hayek, Local Information, and the Decentralization of Chinese State-owned Enterprises

Lixin Colin Xu, May 23, 2018

Hayek (1945) predicts that where local information is important, the organization of production should be decentralized. This prediction is tested and supported in the context of the decentralization of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). SOEs are more likely to decentralize with increasing distance from the seat of the oversight government. This likelihood is especially strong when performance heterogeneity is greater and/or transportation costs are higher.

Verifying China’s COVID-19 Recovery Using the FRBSF China CAT

Remy Beauregard, John G. Fernald, Mark M. Spiegel, Dec 23, 2020

Using the FRBSF China Cyclical Activity Tracker, we confirm the robustness of China’s recovery from the COVID-19 downturn. The FRBSF “China CAT” estimates that first quarter 2020 China GDP plunged 6.4 standard deviations below its detrended level a year earlier, but by the end of the third quarter, China economic activity had recovered to only 0.1 standard deviations below trend. As such, the FRBSF China CAT index validates the accuracy...

The Impact of Corporate Taxes on Firm Innovation: Evidence from the Corporate Tax Collection Reform in China

Jing Cai, Yuyu Chen, Xuan Wang, Dec 19, 2018

We explore a tax reform on manufacturing firms in China in order to study the impact of taxes on firm innovation. The reform switched corporate income tax collection from a local to state tax bureau and reduced the effective tax rate by 10 percent. The reform only applied to firms established after January 2002, allowing us to use a regression...

Does China’s Place-Based Land Policy Lead to Spatial Misallocation?

Min Fang, Libin Han, Zibin Huang, Ming Lu, Li Zhang, Nov 17, 2021

After 2003, the Chinese central government implemented an inland-favoring land supply policy that distributed more construction land quotas to underdeveloped non-eastern regions. We investigate the effect of the policy and find that it drastically increased land and housing prices in more-developed eastern regions, which consequently created substantial spatial misallocation of land and labor. The policy seems to reduce regional output gaps; however, it hurt...