查看更多>>摘要：We offer an assessment of China's macro-economy over 1978-2017, highlighting several neglected channels underlining its great expansion. On the basis of rigorous data work, we estimate the supply side of the post-Reform economy. This reveals an above unity value of the elasticity of capital-labor substitution and a time varying pattern of factor augmenting technical change. Consistent with some strands of the literature, our results suggest three waves of economic development reflecting state-to-private transitions: (I) 1978-1991 (II) 1992-2007, (III) after 2008. The middle wave is associated with improving efficiency of capital, which sharply reverses after the financial crisis consistent with renewed state control of the economy. We then demonstrate how, in addition to factor accumulation and technical progress, the aboveunity substitution elasticity has itself been a source of growth. As an illustration, we draw upon our estimated framework to rationalize China's high and rising savings rate.
查看更多>>摘要：This paper studies the impact of ownership reform on the credit allocation of China's three largest state-owned banks (SOBs) in 2004. Using firm data for 2000-2007, we show that listed companies with higher amounts of debt experience a larger decline in credit access in cities that are more exposed to these SOBs after bank reform, indicating that a bank ownership change pushes loan officers to give much more importance to credit risks in the lending process. We extend our study to the universe of unlisted manufacturing companies and find that bank ownership reform also reduces bank lending to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and low productivity firms in addition to more indebted firms. The negative effect of the reduced SOB lending on firm performance in terms of profitability and investment is only prominent in SOEs and firms with low productivity.
查看更多>>摘要：Despite the typically more pronounced aggregate fluctuations in emerging market economies (EMEs), this paper documents that EMEs exhibit lower relative volatility and countercyclicality of the unemployment rate than small open advanced economies. We link these differences to the larger informal economy in EMEs. We build a small open economy model that combines a formal sector featuring labor search frictions with a frictionless informal sector. A larger informal sector amplifies the impact of productivity and interest rate shocks on formal output, consumption, and employment, while dampening their impact on unemployment. Varying the degree of informality explains a significant fraction of differences in unemployment dynamics across small open economies.
查看更多>>摘要：Recent studies indicate that, since 1980, the US economy has undergone increases in the average markup and the profit share of income and decreases in the labor share and the investment share of spending. We examine the role of monetary policy in these changes as inflation has concurrently trended down. In a simple staggered price model with a non-CES aggregator of individual differentiated goods, a decline of trend inflation as measured since 1980 can account for a substantial portion of the changes. Moreover, adding a rise of highly productive "superstar firms'' to the model can better explain not only the macroeconomic changes but also the micro evidence on the distribution of firms' markups, including the flat median markup.
查看更多>>摘要：Economic roots of populism in Western countries point to the role of economic insecurity that plagues losers from recent large economic shocks. We show that fiscal redistribution matters by comparing Italian municipalities equally hit by the economic shocks leading to populism but, at the same time, very differently exposed to the generosity of the EU structural funds, because of their locations on the two opposite sides of the geographical border that determines eligibility. Estimates resulting from a spatial regression discontinuity design show that in 2013 general election larger EU financing caused a drop in populism of about 9% of the mean of the dependent variable.
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Elsevier