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How Do Zombie Firms Affect Innovation? Evidence from China’s Industrial Firms

Yun Dai, Wei Li, Yongqin Wang, May 08, 2019

Zombie firms are insolvent firms that continue to operate due to continued access to financing at extremely low costs. Nie et al. (2016) find that in the year 2013 about 14 percent of Chinese-listed firms and 7.5 percent of Chinese manufacturing firms are defined as zombie firms. The large amount of financing subsidies distributed to insolvent zombie firms...

Panda Games: Corporate Disclosure in the Eclipse of Search

Kemin Wang, Xiaoyun Yu, Bohui Zhang, Sep 26, 2018

We conduct a textual analysis and exploit an exogenous event — Google’s 2010 surprising withdrawal from the Chinese mainland — which significantly hampered domestic investors’ ability to access foreign information. Following Google’s exit, Chinese firms’ announcements concerning their foreign transactions become more bullish in comparison to similar announcements prior to the exit and to those that involve only domestic transactions. This finding suggests that firms strategically alter their disclosure behaviors when the channel to transmit information is severed.

In-Consumption Social Listening with Moment-to-Moment Unstructured Data

Qiang Zhang, Wenbo Wang, Yuxin Chen, Jan 03, 2019

Major video and live streaming platforms in China have recently introduced a live commenting feature that allows viewers to post comments in real time during video content consumption. Building on the rich live comment data, this research proposes a novel approach for in-consumption social listening to extract live consumption experience. The approach is demonstrated in the context of online movie watching...

Do Interest Rates Play a Major Role in Monetary Policy Transmission in China?

Gunes Kamber, Madhusudan Mohanty, Aug 17, 2018

We explore the role of interest rates in monetary policy transmission in China in the context of its multiple instrument setting. In doing so, we construct a new series of monetary policy surprises using information from high frequency Chinese financial market data around major monetary policy announcements. We find that a contractionary monetary policy surprise increases interest rates and significantly reduces inflation and economic activity. Our findings provide further support to recent studies suggesting that monetary policy transmission in China has become increasingly similar to that in advanced economies.

Data-Intensive Innovation and the State: Understanding China’s AI Leadership

Martin Beraja, David Yang, Noam Yuchtman, Sep 23, 2020

China has become a world leader in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), a data-intensive technology with the potential to transform the global economy. We argue that the Chinese state’s collection of data and provision of data to commercial firms contribute to China’s AI leadership. We provide supportive evidence from China’s facial recognition AI sector and develop a macroeconomic model that illustrates how the Chinese state's surveillance interest aligns with promoting AI innovation, but potentially at the expense of privacy.