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Rebalancing in China: Progress and Prospects

Longmei Zhang, Aug 02, 2017

This paper develops a framework for China’s rebalancing, reviews past progress, and discusses medium-term prospects. China has advanced well in reducing its excessive external surplus and moving towards consumption and services, while still lagging behind in reducing credit reliance, environmental pollution, and income inequality. Going forward, the economy will continue rebalancing in many dimensions, while credit will remain China’s Achilles heel unless decisive corporate restructuring and SOE reforms are implemented.

Physician-Induced Demand: Evidence from China’s Drug Price Zero-Markup Policy

Hanming Fang, Xiaoyan Lei, Julie Shi, Xuejie Yi, Aug 11, 2021

We exploit the staggered rollout of China’s drug price zero-markup policy (ZMP) to study physician-induced demand in healthcare. Our results show that the drug expenses in the treatment hospitals dropped by 63 log points (47 percent) compared with those of the control group; however, the expenses for non-drug services were 28 log points (32 percent) higher in the treatment group than in the control group. Our results provide robust evidence for physician-induced demand.

Going Green in China: Firms’ Responses to Stricter Environmental Regulations

Haichao Fan, Joshua Graff Zivin, Zonglai Kou, Xueyue Liu, Huanhuan Wang, Apr 29, 2020

Evidence from China shows that firms respond to stricter enforcement of the emission reduction target by reducing their pollution. This effect is stronger for firms in industries with higher pollution intensity. Stricter environmental regulations also lead to sharp declines in firms’ profits, capital, and labor. A sequence of tests of the underlying mechanisms reveals...

Impacts of Housing Policy: China’s Experiment

Kaiji Chen, Qing Wang, Tong Xu, Tao Zha, Jan 13, 2021

China’s unprecedented and unexpected loosening of loan-to-value ratio (LTV) policy during 2014Q4–2016Q3 provides an ideal case to study the role of housing policy in housing booms and busts and its impacts on consumption and debt burdens among households. Evidence from three unique micro datasets shows that such a policy change disproportionately increased the share of mortgages to middle-aged and high-income homeowners in the total amount of newly issued mortgages and at the same time reduced their consumption growth...

Do CEOs Know Best? Evidence from China

Nicholas Bloom, Hong Cheng, Mark Duggan, Hongbin Li, Franklin Qian, Jan 30, 2019

Using data from the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES), a recent survey of Chinese manufacturing firms, we analyze the extent to which employees of differing levels are able to assess their firms’ management practices. Our study finds that of CEOs, managers, and workers, CEOs tend to have the most accurate appraisals of their firms. Additionally, we find that firms with higher levels of disagreement...