We study credit allocation across firms and its real effects during China’s economic stimulus plan of 2009–2010. We match confidential loan-level data from the nineteen largest Chinese banks with firm-level data on manufacturing firms. We document that the stimulus-driven credit expansion disproportionately favored state-owned firms and firms with a lower average product of capital, reversing the process of capital reallocation toward private firms that characterized China’s high growth before 2008. We argue that implicit government guarantees for state-connected firms become more prominent during recessions and can explain this reversal.
Received August 23, 2017; editorial decision November 15, 2018 by Editor Philip Strahan.
The spread and resonance of users' opinions on SinaWeibo, the most popular micro-blogging website in China, are tremendously influential, having significantly affected the processes of many real-world hot social events. We select 21 hot events that were widely discussed on SinaWeibo in 2011, and do some statistical analyses. Our main findings are that (i) male users are more likely to be involved, (ii) messages that contain pictures and those posted by verified users are more likely to be reposted, while those with URLs are less likely, (iii) gender factor, for most events, presents no significant difference in reposting likelihood.
Fashion plays such a crucial rule in the evolution of culture and society that it is regarded as a second nature to the human being. Also, its impact on economy is quite nontrivial. On what is fashionable, interestingly, there are two viewpoints that are both extremely widespread but almost opposite: conformists think that what is popular is fashionable, while rebels believe that being different is the essence. Fashion color is fashionable in the first sense, and Lady Gaga in the second. We investigate a model where the population consists of the afore-mentioned two groups of people that are located on social networks (a spatial cellular automata network and small-world networks). This model captures two fundamental kinds of social interactions (coordination and anti-coordination) simultaneously, and also has its own interest to game theory: it is a hybrid model of pure competition and pure cooperation. This is true because when a conformist meets a rebel, they play the zero sum matching pennies game, which is pure competition. When two conformists (rebels) meet, they play the (anti-) coordination game, which is pure cooperation. Simulation shows that simple social interactions greatly promote cooperation: in most cases people can reach an extraordinarily high level of cooperation, through a selfish, myopic, naive, and local interacting dynamic (the best response dynamic). We find that degree of synchronization also plays a critical role, but mostly on the negative side. Four indices, namely cooperation degree, average satisfaction degree, equilibrium ratio and complete ratio, are defined and applied to measure people’s cooperation levels from various angles. Phase transition, as well as emergence of many interesting geographic patterns in the cellular automata network, is also observed.
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