Based on daily transaction data in 214 cities and the difference-in-differences method, we document that daily offline consumption fell by 32%, or 18.57 million RMB per city, during the twelve-week period after China’s COVID-19 outbreak in late January 2020. This implies that China’s offline consumption decreased by over 1.22 trillion RMB in the three-month post-outbreak period, or 1.2% of China’s 2019 GDP. Our estimates suggest a significant economic benefit...
It is well known that various forms of non-tariff trade barriers exist within a country. Empirically, it is difficult to measure these barriers as they can take many forms. We take advantage of a nationwide VAT rebate policy reform in China as a natural experiment to identify the existence of these intranational barriers due to local protectionism and study the impact...
The emergence of third-party online platforms in intermediating financial products has been a new and exciting development in FinTech. We find that, in China post-platform, fund flows become markedly more sensitive to fund performance, and the net flow to the top 10 percent–performing funds more than triples their pre-platform level. In response, fund managers increase their risk taking to enhance...
China’s rapid export growth has spurred extensive research investigating its effects on other economies. However, the exact causes of the boom as well as the slowdown in Chinese exporting after 2007 are less well understood.
A recent study shows that domestic input distortions faced by private firms in China have generated extra incentives for those firms to invest and produce abroad. This finding helps explain an astonishing increase in China’s outward foreign direct investment (FDI) flows since the financial crisis.