Previous research finds that the greater geographic mobility of foreign than native-born workers following economic shocks helps to facilitate local labor market adjustment to shifting regional economic conditions. We examine the role that immigration may have played in enabling U.S. commuting zones to respond to manufacturing job loss caused by import competition from China. Although population headcounts of the foreign-born fell by more than those of the native-born in regions exposed to the China trade shock, the overall contribution of immigration to labor market adjustment in this episode was small. Because most U.S. immigrants arrived in the country after manufacturing regions were already mature, few took up jobs in industries that would later see increased import penetration from China. The foreign-born share of the working-age population in regions with high trade exposure was only three-fifths that in regions with low exposure. Immigration thus appears more likely to aid adjustment to cyclical shocks, in which job loss occurs in regions that had recent booms in hiring, rather than facilitating adjustment to secular regional decline, in which hiring booms occurred in the more distant past.

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.

汇率制度的选择一直是国际金融领域重点探讨的问题之一。本文通过构建新凯恩斯理论模型探讨了资本账户开放下汇率制度的选择。通过比较不同资本账户开放速度、不同汇率制度与不同货币政策规则下，产出、通胀率与汇率的波动情况，并进行福利分析，本文主要得到以下结论：（1）随着汇率制度从相对固定转化为浮动，福利损失不断下降，且随着资本账户开放速度的提高福利损失下降的幅度降低；（2）在本文设定的各种汇率制度下，资本账户的开放都是有助于福利提高的，特别是在资本账户开放速度提高的初始阶段，福利会有显著地提高；（3）资本账户开放要循序渐进地进行，同时进行汇率制度改革才能实现本国的福利最优。本文的结论得到资本账户开放国家开放事实的支持。

普惠金融已经成为全球和中国金融业发展的一个重要理念。在传统金融机构加大普惠金融实践的同时，依赖信息技术、大数据技术和云计算等创新技术的互联网金融进一步拓展了普惠金融的触达能力和服务范围。为了科学、准确地刻画中国数字普惠金融的发展现状，我们利用中国代表性互联网金融机构-蚂蚁金服关于数字普惠金融的微观数据，编制了一套 2011-2015 年省级、城市和县域三个层级的“数字普惠金融指数”。指数结果显示数字普惠金融是实现低成本、广覆盖和可持续的普惠金融的重要模式，数字普惠金融为经济落后地区实现普惠金融赶超经济发达地区提供了可能。