Using a novel database of domestic financial reforms in 90 countries over 1973-2014, we document that global financial liberalization followed an S-curve path: reforms were slow and gradual in early periods, accelerated during the 1990s, and slowed down after 2000. We estimate a learning model...

Using three unique micro datasets, we find that an unexpected and unprecedented loosening of China's LTV policy for non-primary houses fueled the entire mortgage boom during 2014Q4-2016Q3. The mortgage expansion disproportionately increased the share of mortgages to middle-aged homeowners with...

The Chinese economy has undergone three major phases: the 1978-1997 period marked as the SOE-led economy, the 1998-2015 phase as the investment-driven economy, and the new normal economy since 2016. All three economies have been shaped by the government's financial policies, defined as a set of...

Aggregate housing demand shocks are an important source of house price fluctuations in the standard macroeconomic models, and through the collateral channel, they drive macroeconomic fluctuations. These reduced-form shocks, however, fail to generate a highly volatile price-to-rent ratio that...

We document four facts about the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide relevant for those studying the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on COVID-19 transmission. First: across all countries and U.S. states that we study, the growth rates of daily deaths from COVID-19 fell from a wide...

We study the impacts of the 2009 monetary stimulus and its interaction with infrastructure spending on credit allocation. We develop a two-stage estimation approach and apply it to China's loan-level data that covers all sectors in the economy. We find that except for the manufacturing sector,...

This paper presents a procedure for estimating and forecasting disease scenarios for COVID-19 using a structural SIR model of the pandemic. Our procedure combines the flexibility of noteworthy reduced-form approaches for estimating the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic to date with the...

Lending standards are a direct measure of credit conditions. We use the micro data merged from three separate sources to construct this measure and document that an uncertain macroeconomic outlook, rather than banks' balance sheet positions, was an important reason that a majority of banks...

This paper reviews recent literature on China's macroeconomic development, emphasizing the critical role of the gradualist approach over the past four decades. Beyond China's structural transformation, we explore various aspects such as high saving rates, the housing boom, an expanding current...

According to the conventional bank lending channel of monetary policy, wholesale funding in economies with well-developed financial markets moves negatively with retail deposits in response to changes in the monetary policy rate, thereby weakening the transmission of monetary policy. We present...