This study investigates whether corruption differentially affects contracting through auctions and negotiations. Using data on Chinese land-market transactions, where corruption is known to be present, we first show that, on average, it exerts similar effects on transactions carried out via auctions and negotiation. However, this finding masks important heterogeneity – auctions featuring healthy competition are less affected by corruption, and significantly less so than negotiation. We then develop a simple model of bidding under the possibility of corruption that rationalizes our findings.

We study the mandated introduction of a supervised auction for the primary bond market in China. The regulatory intervention significantly reduced the cost of debt for Chinese issuers. Most of the benefits flowed from reduced agency conflict between underwriters and issuers. Using unique bidder-level data from a lead underwriter, we develop replicable tools and techniques to identify collusive bidding behavior resulting in artificial (and economically costly) increases in bond yields. Such evidence can benefit global regulators, issuers, and investors currently using unsupervised auction mechanisms, for example, in securities issuance, construction projects, and procurement.

How much value has been lost in the Chinese bankruptcy system due to excessive liquidation of companies whose going concern value is greater than the liquidation value? I compile new judiciary bankruptcy auction data covering all bankruptcy asset sales from 2017 to 2022 in China. I estimate the valuation of the asset for both the final buyer and creditor through the revealed preference method using an auction model. On average, excessive liquidation results in a 13.5% welfare loss. However, solely considering the liquidation process, an 8% welfare gain is derived from selling the asset without transferring it to the creditors. Firms that are (1) larger in total asset size, (2) have less information disclosure, (3) have less access to the financial market, and (4) possess a higher fraction of intangible assets are more vulnerable to such welfare loss. Overall, this paper suggests that policies promoting bankruptcy reorganization by introducing distressed investors who target larger bankruptcy firms suffering more from information asymmetry will significantly enhance welfare in the Chinese bankruptcy market.

A significant number of procurements in both public and private sectors have adopted the practice of splitting the award among multiple bidders in an auction, as an alternative to the one-winner-take-all approach. This aims to encourage participation from small firms and reduce dependency on a single supplier. One prominent example is China’s national drug procurement multiple-winner auction, where the drug supply is divided among several winners, increasing in proportion to the number of participants. Given the societal importance of drug prices, it is crucial to properly examine the rationale for using split-award auctions. However, there is limited theoretical and empirical guidance available in the literature. This paper investigates the competitive impact of split-award auctions on key outcomes, such as participation and procurement costs, using both a theoretical framework and empirical evidence. Theoretically, it demonstrates that split-award auctions consistently boost participation but also increase expected procurement costs in almost all instances. The expected procurement cost decreases only if the split-award auction raises participation from 0 to 1 compared to the winner-take-all auction. Empirically, the paper estimates the direction and magnitude of the effects on participation and expected procurement costs using drug procurement data. The findings reveal that split-award auctions moderately increase average participation by 0.85 bidders (17%), but significantly raise the unit expected procurement cost by 4 CNY (38%). Almost half of the overall increase in expected procurement costs stems from reallocating production to more expensive bidders, while the other half results from increased markups charged by bidders in response to this reallocation.

This paper provides the first theory and evidence on the role of presale policies in the residential housing market. We start with constructing a novel dataset of unfinished projects, presale policies, and land auction outcomes across 270 major cities in China. We then identify 2,330 unfinished residential projects from 2010 to 2017 on a citizen complaint website run by the central government. We find that both presale criterion and postsale supervision of construction costs relate to a lower probability of unfinished projects. But only presale criterion relates negatively to the pace of new housing development, measured by developers' multitasking and land auction outcomes. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the average bundle of presale policies is inferior to the Pareto frontier in our sampled cities. Tightening the regulation on postsale supervision by 2 standard deviations may lead to a 58% reduction in the occurrence of unfinished projects, while keeping the pace of new housing development unchanged. Eliminating unfinished projects would entail a drastic increase in both presale criterion and postsale supervision, with slower housing development.

China’s housing purchase restriction (HPR) policy imposes administrative restrictions on households’ home purchase eligibility to curb speculative demand. We quantify households’ willingness to pay (WTP) to re-acquire such eligibility. The empirical results based on the staggered DID specification suggest that when local governments implement the HPR policy, the transaction prices of judicial housing auctions legally exempted from HPR increase by 18.91%. This HPR-exempted qualification premium can be converted to an estimate of 22.48% of the transaction price as buyers’ WTP for home purchase eligibility. The heterogeneity analysis also suggests that the WTP significantly increases when speculative incentives are stronger in the housing market. If policymakers in mainland China consider replacing the HPR policy with an additional buyer transaction tax like that in Singapore and Hong Kong, China, the WTP estimates can serve as the benchmark in setting the tax rate.

We study the equilibrium effects of introducing competitive bidding in drug procurement. In 2019, China introduced a competitive bidding program in which drug companies bid for a prespecified procurement quantity in nine provinces. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that the program reduced average drug prices by 47.4%. Generic drug firms won most bids and cut prices by 59.4%. We develop a model of demand and supply to quantify the trade-off between lower prices and potential choice distortions. Competitive bidding increases consumer welfare if policymakers consider brand preferences welfare irrelevant. The program also reduced government expenditures on insurance by 27.5%.

Using a comprehensive dataset of Chinese corporate bond issuances, we uncover substantial evidence of issuance overpricing: the yield spread of newly issued bonds at their first secondary-market trading day is on average 5.35 bps higher than the issuance spread. This overpricing is robust across subsamples of bond issuances with different credit ratings, maturities, issuance types, and issuer status. We further provide extensive evidence to support a hypothesis that competition among underwriters drives this overpricing through two specific channels—either through rebates to participants in issuance auctions or through direct auction bidding by the underwriters for themselves or their clients.

We study how institutional investors utilize potentially biased information by analyzing the e ect of IPO underwriters' earnings forecasts on investors' bidding behaviors in Chinese IPO auctions. Despite the presence of upward biases in underwriters' earnings forecasts, we  nd that investors' bid prices are higher in IPOs with higher earnings forecasts. The investors' positive reaction to biased information can be explained in a rational expectation model where the underwriter has valuable information about the IPO but has a biased incentive in presenting the information to investors. Consistent with the model's predictions, we  nd that an investor's bid price is more sensitive to the underwriter's earnings forecast when the forecast bias is expected to be smaller, when the relative precision of the underwriter's information over the investor's information is higher, and when the investor has a higher valuation of the IPO.

The existing literature on political capital and bank lending has largely overlooked the role of political environment. Based on the theories of political marketplace, all-pay auction and political instability, we examine the conditional effect of political capital on access to bank loans with political environment surrounding private firms changing, using a nationwide survey of private firms in 2010. In particularly, we characterize the political environment with political capital inequality and political instability. We find that private firms have more difficulty gaining access to bank lending with the increase in the degree of political capital inequality. Furthermore, political capital exerts a positive effect on access to bank loans only when political capital inequality within a province exceeds 0.4775 and political instability does not exceed 0.7.