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Homemade Foreign Trading

Zhiguo He, Yuehan Wang, Xiaoquan Zhu, Jul 26, 2023

Our recent study provides evidence that Chinese mainland insiders tend to evade see-through surveillance by round-tripping via the Stock Connect program.

Mortgage Prepayment in China

Zhenyu Gao, Wenxi Jiang, Haohan Ren, Kemin Wang, Yuezhi Wu, Sep 10, 2025

During the 2019–2024 monetary easing cycle, Chinese households used their savings to prepay unprecedented amounts of mortgage loans. Because refinancing was restricted, mortgage rates remained rigid, while savings returns quickly adjusted to rate cuts. The widening gap between borrowing costs and savings returns encouraged prepayment (deleveraging) and reduced consumption. Our findings suggest that the rigid mortgage rates have rendered China’s monetary easing counterproductive.

What Gets Measured Gets Managed: Investment and the Cost of Capital

Zhiguo He, Guanmin Liao, Baolian Wang, Aug 09, 2023

To improve capital allocative efficiency, starting in 2010, Chinese regulators switched from using return on equity to economic value added (EVA).

The Pre-Announcement Drift in China: Government Meetings and Macro Announcements

Jun Pan, Qing Peng, Mar 20, 2024

Confirming Chinese equity market is policy-driven, this study reveals a significant pre-Govt return before top government meetings, akin to the US pre-FOMC drift. It highlights the market's anticipation of these events and their impact on asset pricing, underscoring the centralized financial system in China.

Decoding China’s Industrial Policies

Hanming Fang, Ming Li, Guangli Lu, Jul 02, 2025

Industrial policy is often discussed through high-level narratives and flagship initiatives, yet its implementation—particularly at the subnational level—remains opaque. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to systematically analyze over three million government documents from 2000 to 2022, extracting structured policy information to decode China’s industrial policy at various levels of government. Combining these newly constructed granular industrial policy data with micro-level firm data, we document four sets of facts on China’s industrial policies, including the economic and political rationality of the choice of the target sectors, the dynamics of the policy tools, the diffusion and similarity of policies, and the effects on firm entry and productivity.