Portfolio underdiversification is one of the most costly losses accumulated over a household’s life cycle. We provide new evidence on the impact of financial inclusion services on households’ portfolio choice and investment efficiency using 2015, 2017, and 2019 survey data for Chinese households. We hypothesize that higher financial inclusion penetration encourages households to participate in the financial market, leading to better portfolio diversification and investment efficiency. The results of the baseline model are consistent with our proposed hypothesis that higher accessibility to financial inclusion encourages households to invest in risky assets and increases investment efficiency. We further estimate a dynamic double machine learning model to quantitatively investigate the non-linear causal effects and track the dynamic change of those effects over time. We observe that the marginal effect increases over time, and those effects are more pronounced among low-asset, less-educated households and those located in non-rural areas, except for investment efficiency for high-asset households.

We study the effects of mortgage debt and informal home loans on stock ownership. Mortgage debt is typically originated with licensed financial institutions while informal home loans are obtained from private lending. Using the China Household Finance Survey data, we show that mortgage debt has a positive relationship, while informal home loans have a negative relationship, with a household’s likelihood and degree of subsequent stock market participation. Instrumental variable estimates identify a causal impact of these effects. Further tests demonstrate cross-sectional variations of these effects across urban development, education, financial literacy, loan interest rate, maturity, and funding sources.

This paper provides evidence on the cost of political interference on banks with Chinese Private Enterprise Survey data between 2002 and 2012. Using regional political turnovers as a proxy for political influence, we show that political motivations for future promotions distort the bank lending decisions and crowd out lending to private firms. Besides, firms with business connections are more sensitive to turnover, while political connections are not significantly affected. These lending distortions are more considerable where competition for future promotion is more intense and where incumbents have more influence over banks. Moreover, the effect is especially pronounced for small firms. As a result of reduced bank credit, firms’ total credit availability decreases and they have to cut investments. Overall, our results suggest that preferential lending to politically important sectors has negative spillovers and can lead to costly crowding-out of private sectors.

Despite nearly twenty years of privatization, mixed-ownership reform has been the mainstay of SOE reform in China in recent years. This raises the question of whether the financial performance of mixed-ownership firms (Mixed firms) is better than private-owned enterprises (POEs). Although Mixed firms suffer more from government intervention, unclear property rights, and interest conflicts between state shareholders and private shareholders, they can also benefit from the external resources controlled by the state. Therefore, the performance of Mixed firms is still unclear. Collecting data from the Chinese A-share listed market, we divide the firms into POEs, Mixed firms controlled by the state (MixedSOEs), and Mixed firms controlled by the private sectors (MixedPOEs). Measuring profitability using ROA and ROE, we find that on average, POEs perform better than Mixed firms, and MixedPOEs have a higher profitability than MixedSOEs. Within Mixed firms, more state shares are related to lower profitability, and more private shares are related to higher profitability. Using the NBS survey data, we further find that on average, SOEs exhibit the lowest profitability, with MixedSOEs and MixedPOEs in the middle, and POEs have the highest profitability. We try to address the endogeneity challenge in several ways and get similar results. Overall, our analysis provides new evidence on the financial performance of mixed-ownership firms.

There are large regional disparities in relation to the development of digital finance in China. This study expands on the human–land relationship to analyze the impact of terrain relief on digital finance adoption using China Household Finance Survey data. The results show an inverted U-shaped relationship. Further, mechanism analysis indicates that terrain relief influences the wealth creation environment and stimulates the likelihood of entrepreneurship, especially through small and medium-sized enterprises. In addition, the impact is more pronounced in rural and western areas. These findings provide insights enabling the development of a more inclusive financial system.

In forecast surveys of aggregate macroeconomic and financial variables, the correlation between forecast errors and forecast revisions is positive at the consensus level, but negative at the individual level. Past literature has interpreted this discrepancy as evidence of underreaction to news at the aggregate level and overreaction at the individual level. In this paper, I challenge this view by arguing that noise in predictive judgment can account for the difference. Using a stylized model, I examine how introducing judgment noise at the individual level changes the interpretation of the correlation coefficients. First, a negative coefficient at the individual level no longer necessarily means overreaction. Second, the coefficient at the consensus level underestimates the degree of underreaction. Using forecast survey data, I provide evidence that judgment noise is large enough to reconcile the difference between the two coefficients. The structural parameter measuring over-/underreaction mainly points to underreaction, regardless of whether the model matches correlation coefficients at the individual or aggregate level.

We examine how improving the efficiency of a country’s tax system via the implementation of the information system affects firms’ behavior, utilizing the implementation of the Golden Tax Project III in China as a natural experiment. The Golden Tax Project III strengthens tax enforcement, while standardizes the application procedures for tax incentives. Based on a large-scale corporate tax survey data, we show that large firms enjoy better access to debt finance and increase take-up of tax benefits since the reform, while keeping their tax burden unchanged. The reform leads large firms to increase investment. On the contrary, the reform increases tax burden for small firms, which offsets the positive effect due to better access to debt finance. The reform has limited impact on small firms’ investment or take-up rate of tax incentives. Our study contributes to the debate on how adopting more efficient information system affects tax administration and firms’ real performances.

We survey a large representative sample of retail investors to elicit their memories of stock market investment and return expectations. We then merge the survey data with administrative data of transactions to test a model in which investors form expectations by selectively recalling past experiences similar to the present cue. Our analysis not only uncovers newstylized facts about investor memory, but also provides support for similarity-based recall as a key mechanism of belief formation in ffnancial markets. Market ffuctuations affect investors’ recall: positive market returns cue investors to retrieve episodes of rising markets and recall own performances more positively. Recalled experiences explain a sizable fraction of cross-investor variation in beliefs and dominate actual experiences in explanatory power. We also show that recalled experiences can drive out the explanatory power of recent returns for expected future returns, ruling in a memory-based foundation for return extrapolation.

The New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) rolled out in China from 2003-2008 provided insurance to 800 million rural Chinese. We combine aggregate mortality data with individual survey data, and identify the impact of the NCMS from program rollout and heterogeneity across areas in their rural share. We find that there was a significant decline in aggregate mortality, with the program saving more than one million lives per year at its peak, and explaining 78% of the entire increase in life expectancy in China over this period. We confirm these mortality effects using micro-data on mortality, other health outcomes, and utilization.

Using unique survey data from the China Household Finance Survey, we estimate the extent of “narrow framing”, which is a widely documented behavioral bias, among Chinese households, using their portfolio choices. Conditional on stock market participation, we find that most Chinese households exhibit significant narrow framing. Based on the obtained estimates, we show that narrow framing positively predicts the extent of under diversification. Most importantly, we argue that narrow framing is an irreplaceable of understanding households’ portfolio choices, even after considering measurement error and a wide set of indicators of diversification