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Finance Leases: A Hidden Channel of China’s Shadow Banking System

Jinfan Zhang, Ting Yang, Yanping Shi, Nov 11, 2020

We find that banks use their affiliated leasing firms to provide credit to constrained clients in order to circumvent the government’s targeted monetary tightening policy, which offsets the expected decline in traditional bank loans in overcapacity industries and hampers the effectiveness of the monetary policy. Although this regulatory arbitrage may cause systemic risk at the macro level, bank-affiliated leasing firms...

Price Discovery and Market Segmentation in China’s Credit Market

Zhe Geng, Jun Pan, Apr 08, 2020

The recent unprecedented wave of bond defaults in China has captured the attention of investors worldwide. We document a severe segmentation between the pricing of state-owned enterprise (SOE) and non-SOE bonds that arises sharply post 2018. Using our default measure, we find that this market segmentation is not driven by the fundamentals of the firms. We also show that this market segmentation has also caused...

From Fog to Smog: The Value of Pollution Information

Panle Jia Barwick, Shanjun Li, Liguo Lin, Eric Zou, Feb 05, 2020

During 2013–2014, China launched a nation-wide real-time air quality monitoring and disclosure program, which was a watershed moment in the history of its environmental regulations. We present the first empirical analysis of this natural experiment by exploiting its staggered introduction across cities. The program substantially expanded public access to pollution information, and in turn, triggered a cascade...

Misallocation, Selection, and Productivity: A Quantitative Analysis with Panel Data from China

Tasso Adamopoulos, Loren Brandt, Jessica Leight, Diego Restuccia, Jan 05, 2022

We examine the distorting effects of China’s land institutions on aggregate agricultural productivity and other outcomes. We argue these distortions affect two key margins: (1) the allocation of resources across farmers (misallocation); and (2) the type of farmers who operate in agriculture (selection).

The Impact of Health Insurance on the Wellbeing of Older Chinese

Sisi Yang, Katja Hanewald, Aug 12, 2020

Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) in 2011, 2013 and 2015, we analyze whether the universal health insurance system in China increases the life satisfaction of middle-aged and older adults and to what extent the type of health insurance affects their life satisfaction. We find that the life satisfaction of middle-aged and older adults does not depend on having any health insurance...