What are the effects of policy reversals which were initiated by the US bureaucracy in response 
to the 2008 global financial crisis? Answering this question is challenging because US capital 
markets are relatively mature and policy reversals are far and in between in recent years.  
Specifically, the challenges include the one-time  nature of these US policy reversals, the 
confounding effects of many programs targeting interrelated segments of the capital markets at 
the same time as well as possible endogeneity issues. China, on the other hand, offers a natural 
experiment to study the effects of policy reversals. In the last three decades, the Chinese 
government has initiated many policy changes to liberalize the capital markets and some of these 
have been reversed several times. Using hand-collected data of policy  reversals targeting the 
Chinese stock markets from 1994 through 2009, we are able to address the first two challenges. 
To resolve any endogeneity  issue, we focus on the impact of such policy reversals (targeted at 
the Chinese stock markets) on the Chinese repo markets, which trade market-driven interest rates. 
We find that the Chinese policy reversals are indeed effective in reducing the term spread, the 
volatility of the interest rate, and the volatility of the term spread. Our results suggest that the 
policy risk is systematically priced in financial securities, implying that policy makers can rely 
on financial market indicators to objectively evaluate their policy decisions.                              
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