The 2007 Property Law in China checked the power of local governments to expropriate the assets of private firms and it gave creditors (primarily banks) more rights over the assets underlying their secured loans to private firms. We use the property law as a natural experiment for understanding...

Since the beginning of 1990s, the credit balance of the banking system in mainland China has experienced a big swing from negative to positive. The balance has continued to expand up to now. It seems that both negative and positive credit balances are so large that the financial resources have...