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Working Paper
Persistence of Regional Inequality in China
Regional inequality in China appears to be persistent and even growing in the last two decades. We study potential explanations for this phenomenon. After making adjustments for the difference in the cost of living across provinces, we find that some of the inequality in real wages could be attributed to differences in quality of labor, industry composition, labor supply elasticities, and geographical location of provinces. These factors, taken together, explain about half of the cross-province real wage difference. Interestingly, we find that inter-province redistribution did not help offset ...
Journal Article
Interprovincial inequality in China
In this Economic Letter, we document the increasing income inequality among Chinese provinces over the past two decades. Our discussion highlights three important facts. First, economic growth has lifted living standards throughout China, with all provinces gaining in absolute terms. Second, economic growth has benefited some provinces more than others, increasing regional income inequality. Third, no single explanation can account for the steady increase in inequality among provinces over time. These observations suggest that China, like many industrialized nations, will continue to struggle ...
Working Paper
Beyond Kuznets: persistent regional inequality in China
Regional inequality in China appears to be persistent and even growing in the past two decades. We study potential offsetting factors and interprovincial migration to shed light on the sources of this persistence. We find that some of the inequality could be attributed to differences in quality of labor, industry composition, and geographical location of provinces. We also demonstrate that interprovincial migration, while driven in part by wage differences across provinces, does not offset these differences. Finally, we find that interprovincial redistribution did not help offset regional ...
Working Paper
Bond currency denomination and the yen carry trade
We examine the determinants of issuance of yen-denominated international bonds over the period from 1990 through 2010. This period was marked by low Japanese interest rates that led some investors to pursue "carry trades," which consisted of funding investments in higher interest rate currencies with low interest rate, yen-denominated obligations. In principle, bond issuers that have flexibility in their funding currency could also conduct a carry-trade strategy by funding in yen during this low interest rate period. We examine the characteristics of firms who appeared to have adopted this ...
Working Paper
Bank Linkages and International Trade
We show that bank linkages have a positive effect on international trade. We construct the global banking network (GBN) at the bank level, using individual syndicated loan data from Loan Analytics for 1990-2007. We compute network distance between bank pairs and aggregate it to country pairs as a measure of bank linkages between countries. We use data on bilateral trade from IMF DOTS as the subject of our analysis and data on bilateral bank lending from BIS locational data to control for financial integration and financial flows. Using gravity approach to modeling trade with country-pair and ...
Journal Article
Bank relationships and the depth of the current economic crisis
The financial crisis has been worldwide in scope, but the severity has differed from country to country. Those countries whose banks played a more central role in the global financial system, were important intermediaries, or had extensive direct relationships tended to be less seriously affected, as measured by the extent of the decline in their stock markets in 2008.
Journal Article
Did large recalls of Chinese consumer goods lower U.S. imports from China?
This Economic Letter analyzes the extent to which recalls have led to fewer U.S. imports from China in affected industries and whether there has been a general backlash against the "Made in China" label.