Trademarks, which identify the source of goods and services, account for the majority of intellectual property filings worldwide. We investigate how firms adapt to the introduction of trademark institutions by exploring a historical precedent: China’s trademark law of 1923, an unanticipated and disapproved response to end foreign privileges in China.
By using data on 137 counties in north China, we find that the density of financial institutions (Qianzhuang and Diandang) in the late Qing period has a significant positive effect on the number and total assets of small loan companies, a dominant institution of informal finance today. The persistent effect of historical financial institutions can be explained by Confucian culture, which instills integrity, lineage solidarity and acquaintance networks.
As a quasi-natural experiment to estimate the causal impact of the collateral-based unconventional monetary policy, we exploit the expansion of the collateral for the Medium-Term Lending Facility (MLF) in the interbank bond market on June 1, 2018 by the People’s Bank of China. We also consider that many bonds are dual-listed in a largely segmented exchange market. We find that the policy reduced the spreads of the newly collateralizable, dual-listed bonds in the treatment...
Many developing countries adopt industrial policies favoring upstream sectors. Liu (2018) shows these policies might enhance aggregate production efficiency. When sectors form a production network, market imperfections generate distortions that compound through input demand linkages, accumulating into upstream sectors and creating an incentive for...
Reverse mortgages are financial products that allow older homeowners to live in their property and receive income for as long as they live; repayment is made from the proceeds of the property sales upon the homeowners’ death. A recent pilot program in China by Happy Life Insurance found almost no takeup of such products. We investigate whether, if reverse...