This paper explores the role of political connection on the overinvestment of Chinese energy firms. We argue that political connection can act as a “helping hand” that enables energy firms to obtain more government support to invest and a “grabbing hand” that forces politically connected...

Sovereign borrowing during inflation surges is a litmus test of a government's ability to withstand and navigate macroeconomic shocks. Based on transaction-level bond issuance data, we explore how sovereign financing strategies respond to inflation surges and how policy practices affect their...

We utilize monthly individual-level financial data and item-level supermarket sales data to study how consumption responds to one of the costliest natural disasters in India. We find that consumption dropped by 11% during the disaster, 65% of which was recovered after the disaster. On average,...

How do governments finance their unprecedented fiscal stimuli and policy actions to combat the COVID-19 pandemic? Comparing sovereign bond issuances before and after the outbreak of COVID-19, we find that governments borrow more from bond markets in response to greater pandemic shocks. This is...

China has strategically accelerated liberalization of foreign direct investment (FDI) since Donald Trump won the 2016 United States presidential election. We find that, despite rising US-China trade tension, this investment liberalization increases FDI from non-US advanced markets (AMs) to China...