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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Reform and Opening-Up Can Make China’s Economy Grow by An Average of 5.5% Over the Next 15 Years

The Solow Growth Model (Solow Model, a quick primer), named after Nobel prize winner Robert Solow explains how an economy can grow relative to inputs such as capital, technology and labor. As Tianyong Zhou of the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics points out however this model does a poor job at explaining China’s past […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Global vs. Local ESG Ratings: Evidence from China

J.P. Morgan was asked in 1912 by a Congressional Subcommittee (the Pujo Committee) what the most important factor in determining creditworthiness was? His answer became famous: “The first thing [in credit] is character … before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it.… A man I do not trust could not get money from me […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – China’s Challenge to the Global Commons: Compliance, Contestation, and Subversion in the Maritime and Cyber Domains

Kristi Govella, Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian Studies of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa takes a closer look at how rising powers (read China throughout) are dealing with ‘global commons’ issues. By looking at how rising powers have dealt with the long established and widely accepted norms in place in the centuries […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – How to Save the WTO with More Flexible Trading Rules

In a Peterson Institute for International Economics Policy Brief (an accessible 11-pager) Professor Robert Z. Lawrence of Harvard University addresses the issue of the precariousness of the WTO in the light of unilateral sanctions by members against one another in recent years. That the WTO isn’t functioning properly is a problem not helped by America’s […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Institutional Investors’ Corporate Site Visits and Aggressive Financial Reporting

There’s an established body of research on how investor contact can affect company behavior. Most work concludes the interactions are beneficial in that the process shines more light on the corporate managers and more light is better than less. The work picked over today is therefore of interest as it demonstrates how, in certain circumstances, […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The Mongol Empire and the Great Divergence

From a somewhat unexpected source comes new work on the age-old question of why the East failed to industrialize and why the Industrial Revolution was a Euro-centric affair. Rafael Torres Gaviria, from the Department of Economics at the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia believes the answer, in a nutshell, is Mongols. The mystery is more […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Stock Market Liberalization and Stock Tail Systemic Risk: Evidence from China’s “Mainland-Hong Kong Connect” Program

To liberalize or not to liberalize, that is the question many developing markets wrestle with. If you open up your markets you could be opening up to chicanery, volatility and a noncompetitive increase in the cost of capital as a result. If you don’t, you could lose the benefits of better actors and the improved […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The Coming Central Bank Digital Currency Revolution and the E-CNY: Considerations and Ramifications

Heng Wang and Ross P. Buckley of the University of New South Wales, in a paper for a forthcoming edition of the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies, bring us up to date on China’s progress with their Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) or as it’s mostly now referred to the e-CNY. If the subject is […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – CHIPS Act will spur US production but not foreclose China

Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Megan Hogan, both of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (a Washington based think tank), take a closer look at “The CHIPS and Science Act, signed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on August 9, 2022, [Which, in their words] represents the biggest US foray into industrial policy in 50 years.” […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Do Shared E-Bikes Reduce Urban Carbon Emissions?

Unsurprisingly, for-profit providers of shared e-bike services claim they reduce carbon emissions; but is this true? Qiumeng Li (et al.) of the University of Cambridge notes in the paper highlighted today there’s (until now?) no real consensus on this among the scientific community. The problem is if they’re being used instead of a regular bike […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – ESG, State Ownership, and Stock Returns: Evidence from China

Social science and economics researchers love ‘exogenous shocks’ or what the rest of us call ‘bolts from the blue’. These shocks allow them to look for patterns the slow creep of orderly progress often mask. Zhenshu Wu (et al.) from the Tilberg University of the Netherlands has used the shock of the COVID-19 stock market […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Housing Wealth and Online Consumer Behavior: Evidence from Xiong’an New Area in China

Hanming Fang, at the University of Pennsylvania – Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (et al.), isn’t claiming the paper highlighted today is revelatory. There’s no doubt people feel better and spend more when home prices rise than when they fall. What’s new in this work however is the data being compared and, […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – A Tale of Tier 3 Cities

Professor Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University and Yuanchen Yang of the IMF, writing in a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.), supply a fresh and perhaps the most up to date look at China’s residential property market. The focus of the paper is not the widely reported-on Tier 1 […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Employee Treatment and Stock Price Crash Risk: Evidence from China

Since 2010 a widely accepted index of employee satisfaction has been available in China from CSR-analysis service provider Hexun.com. Using this information Professor Xu Xixong (et al.) from the School of Economics and Business Administration at the Chongqing University set about finding out if there was a relationship between Chinese firm stock-price crash-risk and happy […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Submarine Cables and Container Shipments: Two Immediate Risks to the US Economy If China Invades Taiwan

The attack on a gas pipeline in Europe recently reminds there are a lot of assets that run under oceans, and top of them, that are all also vulnerable. Christine A. McDaniel and Weifeng Zhong of the George Mason University – Mercatus Center, have had a closer look at Taiwan in this regard focusing on […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Evaluating Environmental Benefits from Driving Electric Vehicles: The Case of Shanghai, China

Feng Wei (et al.) from the Shandong University has taken a snapshot, 2018, of the largest EV-adopting city in China, Shanghai, to try and calculate the benefits of EV introduction. The paper is filled with fascinating observation of which one is an aside noting not all EVs are equal in terms of their environmental benefit. […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The Effect of the U.S.–China Trade War on Chinese Corporate Innovation: A Curse or a Blessing?

Leona Shao Zhi Li (et al.) from the University of Macau claims the work highlighted today is “..the first comprehensive study to examine the impact of [An] adverse foreign trade policy shock on innovation responses in the source country,..”. I’m sure this is correct, but it’s sad to note only recently has data on this […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The Characteristics of Chinese Psychological Needs and Their Correlations to Political Attitudes

Researchers (in the West) pinned down a long time ago the business of knowing what ‘type’ you are and then inferring political (and all sorts of other, social, religious and etc.) leanings. Nearly all of that work though has been conducted in Western democracies and Xiaoxiao Shen, a doctoral student at Princeton University, wondered if […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – China’s Financial System and Economy: A Review

In a piece for the Annual Review of Economics (a publication by academics, for academics, about what other academics are up to) Zhiguo He of the Booth School of Business and NBER and Wei Wei of the Becker Friedman Institute (both Booth and Becker Friedman at the University of Chicago) review the literature on China’s […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Chinese Regional Planning Under Xi Jinping: The Politics and Policy Implications of the Greater Bay Area Initiative

In an ‘Occasional Paper’ from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center Jason Jia Xi Wu (a Shenzhen native) dissects the Greater Bay Area (GBA) Initiative for what it reveals about central planning in the Xi-Era. His conclusions are not encouraging. It’s a long and dense piece but the short summary, I think, is this: Central […]