China has weathered the global financial turmoil in much better shape than most other countries, including the United States. However, there been concerns that banks loosened their lending standards too much as a result of a huge stimulus, among other factors. This led to excessive lending to...

As this piece is being written, the Obama administration is exploring the idea of creating one or more aggregator institutions, “bad” banks, to take illiquid assets - mostly mortgages and mortgage-related securities of uncertain value - off the hands of the private banking system. Indeed, by...

Leveraging the sharp changes in environmental regulation embedded in China's 11th Five-Year Plan (FYP), which covered the period from 2006 to 2010, we characterize the degree to which the plan softens trade-offs between emissions and output. We document that the 11th FYP is associated with...