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Peak China Housing?

Kenneth Rogoff, Yuanchen Yang, Sep 16, 2020

China’s real estate market has been a key engine of its sustained economic expansion. This paper argues, however, that even before the COVID-19 shock, a decades-long housing boom had given rise to price misalignments and regional supply-demand mismatches, making an adjustment both necessary and inevitable. Based on input-output analysis and benchmarking against other economies, we estimate the size of China’s real estate–related activities to be 29% of the economy and conclude that the sector is quite vulnerable to a sustained aggregate growth shock.

Understanding the Chinese Stock Market: Long-term Performance and Institutional Reforms

Franklin Allen, Jun Qian, Chenyu Shan, Lei Zhu, Jul 05, 2017

The Chinese economy had spectacular growth in the past three decades, however the Chinese stock market had the worst performance among the major stock markets. Professor Franklin Allen from Imperial College, Professor Jun Qian from Fanhai International School of Finance, Fudan University, and coauthors offer their explanation of this puzzling divergence.

Gaokao, Ability, and Occupation Choice

Chong-En Bai, Ruixue Jia, Hongbin Li, Xin Wang, Jul 28, 2021

In China, the college entrance exam score is predictive for both firm success and wage-job success in the future, yet higher-score individuals are less likely to create firms.

The 2009 Monetary Stimulus in China

Kaiji Chen, Patrick Higgins, Daniel F. Waggoner, Tao Zha, Mar 21, 2018

Massive monetary injections occurred in 2009Q1-Q4 as a result of a drastic change in monetary policy causing an unprecedented credit expansion in 2009-2011, which stimulated economic growth in the short-run. New credit was disproportionately allocated to real estate and its supporting heavy industries and fueled a sharp rise in land prices. The long-lasting consequence of this monetary stimulus resulted in a twin problem facing China: the high investment-to-GDP and debt-to-GDP ratios.

Notching R&D Investment with Corporate Income Tax Cuts in China

Zhao Chen, Zhikuo Liu, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, Daniel Yi Xu, Aug 16, 2017

To encourage innovation, the Chinese government gave tax incentives to firms whose R&D intensity (as measured by the ratio of R&D expenditures over total sales) exceeds a threshold that varies by their total sales. Using a major corporate tax reform in 2008, Professor Daniel Yi Xu from Duke University and his coauthors provide empirical evidence for some "strategic" behavior — including some relabeling of administrative expenditures as R&D — by the firms to take advantage of the tax incentives.