We study the economic role of banks’ soft information, which evolved from repeated lending relationships, in the context of loan default. Using a proprietary database from one of the largest state-owned commercial banks in China, we find that the bank’s internal credit rating scores play a...

The evolution by sexual selection of the male propensity to engage in conspicuous consumption contributed to the emergence of modern rates of economic growth. We develop a model in which males engage in conspicuous consumption to send an honest signal of their quality to females. Males who...

This paper studies the effects of live-in foreign domestic workers (FDWs) on children’s educational achievement using samples from two population censuses and a survey dataset. The census data shows that the incidence of express schooling is significantly higher for children who are under the...

This paper presents the inequality measures for different spatial groupings in China from 1997 to 2007. The intra-provincial inequality within each province, that is, the inequality amongst the county-level units within each province, is derived. It is found that the levels of inequality in the...

Using data on 61 oil companies from 2001-09, we examine the evolution of revenue efficiency of National Oil Companies (NOCs) and shareholder-owned oil companies (SOCs). We find that NOCs generally are less efficient than SOCs, but their efficiency increased faster over the last decade. We also...

This paper uses a descriptive statistical approach to identify longer-term patterns, or empirical regularities, in the prices of 16 prominent metals from 1950 to 2010. We also examine some related aspects of the behaviour of the corresponding volumes. Our approach is to summarise the data in the...

The term "middle income trap" has been widely used in the literature, without having been clearly dened or formally tested. We propose a statistical denition of a middle income trap and derive a simple time-series test. We nd that the concept survives a rigorous scrutiny of the data, with the...

Chinese GDP growth faces rising handicaps that include the slowdown and eventual contraction of its labour force, a complication of which is its rising sex ratio at birth. The undesirable consequences of the resulting gender imbalance include excessive saving as families with boys compete to...