China's high household savings rate has attracted great academic interest but remains a puzzle. Potential explanations include demographic, policy, and financial causes. Yet a lack of reliable microlevel data on household finances makes it difficult to assess the relative importance of each...

China's land market features a substantial industrial discount: industrial-zoned land is an order of magnitude cheaper than residential land. In contrast to explanations centered on subsidies to industry or promoting industry growth, we emphasize the importance of future tax revenues from the...

The rise of shadow banking and attendant financial fragility in China can be traced to intensified deposit competition following the global financial crisis (GFC). Deposit competition intensified after the GFC because the GFC slowed down banks' deposit growth from cross-border money inflows and...

Governments are important financiers of private sector innovation. While these public funds can ease capital constraints and information asymmetries, they can also introduce political distortions. We empirically explore these issues for China, where a quarter of firms' R&D expenditures come from...