The majority of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China were privatized through ownership reforms over the last two decades. Using a comprehensive dataset of all medium and large enterprises in China between 1998 and 2013, we show that privatized SOEs continue to benefit from government support...

Reverse mortgages provide an alternative source of retirement funding by allowing older homeowners to borrow against their home. However, a recent pilot program of reserve mortgage products in several large Chinese cities saw almost no take up. To ascertain the demand for reverse mortgages in...

Over the past twenty years, especially the past decade, China has taken enormous strides to develop its bond market as an integral step of financial reform. This paper aims to provide the most up-to-date overview of Chinese bond markets, by highlighting two distinct and largely segmented...

The quality of governance depends on public sector worker productivity. We use micro data from China to document that judges are less productive on polluted days. Building on the insights of Alchian and Kessel (1962), we discuss the role of organization design and the incentives of public versus...

How important is the exercise of classical monopsony power against labor for the level of wages and labor's share? We examine this in the context of China and India - two large, rapidly-growing developing economies. Using theory, we develop a novel screen to quantify how wages are affected by...

China's national accounts are based on data collected by local governments. However, since local governments are rewarded for meeting growth and investment targets, they have an incentive to skew local statistics. China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) adjusts the data provided by local...

Using proprietary individual level loan data, this paper explores the economic consequences of the 2009 bank entry deregulation in China. Such deregulation leads to higher screening standards, lower interest rates, and lower delinquency rates for corporate loans from entrant banks. Consequently,...

Using transaction-level data for all Chinese firms exporting between 2000 and 2006, we find that on average 78% of exporters to a country in a given year were new exporters. Among these new exporters, an average of 60% stopped serving the same country the following year. These rates are higher...

We study how adverse economic shocks influence political outcomes in authoritarian regimes in strong states, by examining the 2013-2015 export slowdown in China. We exploit detailed customs data and the variation they reveal about Chinese prefectures' underlying exposure to the global trade...

This paper estimates the return to an elite university education over a college graduate's career using the CHIP 2013 data. We find a substantial premium for graduating from an elite Chinese university at job entry, but it declines quickly with labor market experience. This pattern is entirely...