Chinese firms are increasingly utilizing tax havens like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and the British Virgin Islands to raise large sums of capital from foreign investors, accounting for over 60% of total offshore equities by 2020.
Based on daily transaction data in 214 cities and the difference-in-differences method, we document that daily offline consumption fell by 32%, or 18.57 million RMB per city, during the twelve-week period after China’s COVID-19 outbreak in late January 2020. This implies that China’s offline consumption decreased by over 1.22 trillion RMB in the three-month post-outbreak period, or 1.2% of China’s 2019 GDP. Our estimates suggest a significant economic benefit...
The children of cadres have a higher likelihood of owning business in China, and this relationship varies greatly with government intervention in the economy. Connections with government are likely to be the explanation behind this pattern.
Exploiting the staggered rollout, since 2014, of judicial independence reform that removed local governments’ control over local courts’ financial and personnel decisions in China, we show that judicial independence can reduce local protectionism and foster cross-regional economic integration.
We find that capital import has a substantially larger productivity effect than intermediates import, by generating significant long-term productivity gains through R&D-capital synergy, R&D-inducing, and direct dynamic productivity effects. Our findings highlight the importance of tariff structure in tariff liberalization: the change in tariff structure explains 18% of the productivity gains following China’s WTO accession.