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Working Paper
If you try, you’ll get by: Chinese private firms’ efficiency gains from overcoming financial constraints
It appears to be common knowledge that external financing in China is mostly limited to state-owned firms and is hard to obtain for smaller private firms. In this paper we first confirm this pattern for more recent data and then investigate ways in which private firms overcome their financing constraints. We find that private firms reduce their need for external funds through more efficient management of inventory levels and accounts receivable. We further show that the low levels of inventories and accounts receivable in Chinese private firms are not below efficient levels and are unlikely ...
Conference Paper
Negative effects of personal bankruptcy filing for homeowners: reduced credit access and lost option value
Focusing on home owners, the paper discusses the reduction in a household?s credit access due to bankruptcy filing and its two effects that may deter a household from filing for bankruptcy. Empirical evidence presented in the paper suggests that a household with a bankruptcy record is about 30% more likely to lose home ownership and consequently the mortgage loans captured in the house, compared to than a similar household without such a record. Since the household is forced to consume at a credit level below their desired level, this translates into an important deterrence effect for ...
Working Paper
Are There Productivity Spillovers from Foreign Direct Investment in China?
We review previous literature on productivity spillovers of foreign direct investment (FDI) in China and conduct our own analysis using a firm-level data set from a World Bank survey. We find that the evidence of FDI spillovers on the productivity of Chinese domestic firms is mixed, with many positive results largely due to aggregation bias or failure to control for endogeneity of FDI. Attempting over 2500 specifications which take into account forward and backward linkages, we fail to find evidence of systematic positive productivity spillovers from FDI. We do, however, find robust evidence ...
Working Paper
Did Foreign Direct Investment Put an Upward Pressure on Wages in China?
When similar patterns of expansion and contraction are observed across sectors, we call this a business cycle. Yet explaining the similarity and synchronization of these cycles across industries remains a puzzle. Whereas output growth across industries is highly correlated, identifiable shocks, like shocks to productivity, are far less correlated. While previous work has examined complementarities in production, we propose that sectors make similar input decisions because of complementarities in information acquisition. Because information about driving forces has a high fixed cost of ...