We conducted a nationwide field experiment in China to evaluate the direct and indirect impacts of assigning firms to public or private citizen appeals treatments when they violate pollution standards. There are three main findings. First, public appeals to the regulator through social media substantially reduce violations and pollution emissions, while private appeals cause more modest environmental improvements. Second, experimentally adding “likes” and “shares” to social media appeals increases regulatory effort, suggesting visibility as an important mechanism. Third, treatment pollution reductions are not offset by control firm increases, based on randomly varying the proportion of treatment firms at the prefecture-level.

This paper provides new estimates of the housing stock, construction rates and price developments by city tier in China in order to understand where excess supply might be concentrated, and the implications of any significant contraction. We also update estimates of the size of China’s rapidly evolving real estate sector through 2021, allowing one to look at the initial impact of COVID-19, as well as extending the analysis to incorporate urban-expansion related infrastructure construction. We argue that China overall faces imbalances between supply and demand for housing stock, but the problem is significantly deeper in the generally smaller and lower income tier 3 cities, which nevertheless account for more than 60% of both China’s GDP and its housing stock.

We review theoretical and empirical work on the economic effects of the United States and China trade relations during the last decades. We first discuss the origins of the China shock, its measurement, and present methods used to study its economic effects on different outcomes. We then focus on the recent U.S.-China trade war. We discuss methods used to evaluate its effects, describe its economic effects, and analyze if this increase in trade protectionism reverted the effects of the China shock. The main lessons learned in this review are: (i) the aggregate gains from U.S.-China trade created winners and losers; (ii) China's trade expansion seems not to be the main cause of the decline in U.S. manufacturing employment during the same period; and (iii) the recent trade war generated welfare losses, had small employment effects, and was ineffective in reversing the distributional effects due to the China shock.

We empirically characterize how China is internationalizing the Renminbi by staggering the entry of different types of foreign investors into its domestic bond market and propose a dynamic reputation model to explain this strategy. Our framework rationalize China’s strategy as trying to build credibility as an international currency issuer while reducing the cost of capital flight. We provide a sufficient statistic to measure countries' reputation over time and show that it can be estimated using micro data on foreign investors' portfolios. We use our framework to explore how countries compete to become a reserve currency provider.

From 2013 to 2015, China lifted the ban on margin trading for designated stocks based on apublic ranking index. Using a regression discontinuity design that exploits the threshold rules, I find that margin trading eligibility causes the stock share turnover and prices to increase. Moreover, firms react to this speculative pressure by manipulating earnings and reducing long-term investment. These effects are stronger for firms that are more prone to investor short-termism ex-ante. Consistent with managerial myopia, marginable firms later experience a decline in operating performance. My results suggest that margin traders, as short-term speculators, pressure the manager to focus on current earnings and take myopic actions.

We document the rise of China in offshore capital markets. Chinese firms use global tax havens to access foreign capital both in equity and bond markets. In the last twenty years, China's presence went from raising a negligible amount of capital in these markets to accounting for more than half of equity issuance and around a fifth of global corporate bonds outstanding in tax havens. Using rich micro data, we show that a range of Chinese firms, including both tech giants and SOEs, use these offshore centers. We conclude by discussing the macroeconomic and financial stability implications of these patterns.

Using a difference-in-differences (DID) approach, this research assesses the effect of a firm’s credit rating issued by domestic rating agencies on stock price crash risk (SPCR). The results show that SPCR for treated firms decreases by 11% after firm ratings, suggesting that they can aggravate information content at the firm level. The effect is consistently more evident when stock price synchronization is higher and is stronger in firms with low media coverage, in firms with low audit quality, in state-controlled firms, and in firms with low investor protection. In addition, during a bear market year, the quality of firm ratings is higher. Overall, our findings support that investors could gain more information via firm ratings issued by credit rating agencies. Through our research, policymakers and investors can pay more attention to firm ratings that help play the information intermediary role of credit rating agencies.

Stock market prediction provides the decision-making ability to the different stockholders for their investments. Recently, stock technical indicators (STI) emerged as a vital analysis tool for predicting high-dimensional stock data in various studies. However, the prediction performance and error rate still face limitations due to the lack of correlational analysis between STI and stock movement. This paper proposes a correlational strategy to overcome these challenges by analyzing the correlation of STI with stock movement using neural networks with the feature vector. This strategy adopts the Pearson coefficient to analyze STI and close index of stock data from 8 Chinese companies in the Hong Kong stock market. The results reveal the price prediction of BiLSTM outperformed the GRU and LSTM in various datasets and prior studies.

This paper examines the ‘certification’ of government venture capital (GVC) programs, disputes whether the Chinese government venture capital (CGVC) can promote target firms’financing through the ‘certification’ on target firms, and how the ‘certification’ work. Using a dataset of 87865 Chinese listed firms over 2008–2018, we confirmed that CGVC’s investment promotes target firms’ equity financing but inhibits corporate debt financing through the certification effect and CGVC’s reputation. Moreover, the high reputation of GVC and high market awareness could strength the ‘certification effect.’Simultaneously, the ‘certification effect’is only effective for early and late-stage firms and private-owned firms, and invalid for mature stage and state-owned firms.

Despite the importance of property rights protection, evidence of their impact on thebirth, survival, and operations of the whole universe of firms, and the broad impact on the economy, is limited. In this paper we address this important question by utilizing unique administrative firm-level datasets in China. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that the China’s 2007 Property Law led to significant more new private firms, firms that eventually survive, firms with less shareholders, and more new exporters, whereas the impact is the opposite for state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Moreover, we find that the switch in resources between private firms and SOEs contributes to higher economic growth without sacrificing environmental quality.