Latest Research Highlights
Digital Currencies: THE US, CHINA, AND THE WORLD AT A CROSSROADS.
Central bank digital currencies have taken flight globally, and China is boldly leading the way. I contributed the second Chapter on this book.
China’s Financial System and Economy: A Review, 08/2022, with Wei Wei. Prepared for Annual Review of Economics.
Review the recent literature on China’s financial system and its connections to the Chinese economy based on the categories of aggregate financing to the real economy (AFRE), a broad measure of the nation’s yearly flow of liquidity that takes into consideration the unique features of the China’s financial system.
Investing in Lending Technology: IT Spending in Banking, 08/22, with Sheila Jiang, Douglas Xu, and Xiao Yin.
Link banks’ IT spending in various categories to different lending technologies. Communication IT is associated more with improving banks’ ability of soft information production and transmission, while software IT helps enhance banks’ hard information processing capacity. Large banks respond more in IT spending to Fintech entry.
Agency MBS as Safe Assets, 11/2022, with Zhaogang Song.
The convenience premium of agency MBS averages 47 bps, about half of Treasury’s. Via prepayment-driven demand channel, MBS convenience premium depends on mortgage rate negatively, which contrasts with the positive dependence of MBS-repo convenience premium on interest rates implied by the “opportunity cost of money” hypothesis.
Share Pledging in China: Funding Listed Firms or Funding Entrepreneurship?, 01/2022, with Bibo Liu and Feifei Zhu.
Challenge the common wisdom that share pledging funds in China circle back to the listed firms: a majority of the largest shareholders (67.3%) use pledging funds outside the listed firms. Connect share pledging and entrepreneurial activities, with an identification strategy based on the launch of the exchange market in 2013 that favors natural person shareholders against that by legal entity shareholders.
Other Academic Appointments
- Finance PhD program area advisor, University of Chicago, Booth School of Business
- Director of Becker Friedman Institute for Economics in China, University of Chicago
- Faculty co-director of the Fama-Miller Center, University of Chicago
- Executive Editor of Review of Asset Pricing Studies
- Special-term Alibaba Foundation Professor, Tsinghua University, School of Economics and Management
- Research associate at National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
- Senior fellow at Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER)