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Government-Directed Urban Growth, Firm Entry, and Industrial Land Prices in Chinese Cities

Jan K. Brueckner, Wenhua Liu, Wei Xiao, Junfu Zhang, May 17, 2023

We examine the effect of large-scale administrative reorganization in China, where counties are annexed into cities to accommodate urban growth.

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).

Foreign Business Exposure, Policy Uncertainty, and Capital Flight from Home: Evidence from China

Dongxu Li, Xiaoxue Hu, Sep 22, 2021

Using subsidiary-level data of 3,863 Chinese nonfinancial firms from 2000 to 2019, we show that the multinationals have 5.3% higher capital expenditures than the domestic firms relative to the average. The multinational firms’ offshore investment increases with policy uncertainty about the domestic markets. Our analysis suggests that in the face of domestic uncertainty, multinational firms switch to...

Financing Micro-entrepreneurship in Online Crowdfunding Markets: Local Preference versus Information Frictions

Jian Ni, Yi Xin, Sep 30, 2020

Crowdfunding has become an important financing alternative for micro-entrepreneurship. We study to what extent bias toward local entrepreneurs is prevalent in crowdfunding markets, determine the main driving forces for such bias, and examine how crowdfunding platforms and policymakers can leverage these forces to stimulate micro-entrepreneurship. Even though online crowdfunding platforms are designed to overcome geographic barriers, we find evidence of strong local bias induced by both informational frictions and local preference, with the former being more important.

Ray of Hope? The Rise of Solar Energy in China

Ignacio Banares-Sanchez, Robin Burgess, Dávid László, Pol Simpson, John Van Reenen, Yifan Wang, Mar 25, 2026

China’s solar subsidies triggered innovation and learning-by-doing that dramatically lowered global solar costs while generating domestic economic gains large enough to outweigh the subsidy costs, showing that green industrial policy can simultaneously boost growth and help fight climate change.