The high and rising household savings rate in China is not easily reconciled with the traditional explanations that emphasize life cycle factors, the precautionary saving motive, financial development, or habit formation. This paper proposes a new competitive saving motive: As the sex ratio...

Motivated by recent empirical work, this paper formalizes a theory of competitive savings - an arms race in household savings for mating competition that is made more fierce by an increase in the male-to-female ratio in the pre-marital cohort. Relative to the empirical work, the theory can...

How does increasing globalization affect corporate transparency? Freer trade represents different facets and in theory has ambiguous effects on corporate transparency. On the one hand, by exposing firms to more product market competition, it could discourage discretionary disclosure. On the...

China experiences an increasingly severe relative surplus of men in the pre-marital age cohort. The existing literature on its consequences focuses mostly on negative aspects such as crime. In this paper, we provide evidence that the imbalance may also stimulate economic growth by inducing more...

While openness to trade is a well-recognized hallmark of many successful emerging market economies known as "growth miracles," another component of the growth model is a leapfrogging strategy - the use of policies to guide the industrial structural transformation ahead of a country's factor...

This paper generalizes the gross exports accounting framework, initially proposed by Koopman, Wang, and Wei (2014) for a country's aggregate exports, to one at the sector, bilateral, and bilateral-sector levels. Such a generalization requires a conceptual distinction between value added exports...

This paper is the first chapter in the Oxford Companion to the Economics of China (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Rather than trying to summarize other contributors' views, we provide our own perspectives on the Economics of China--the past experience and the future prospects. Our...

In partial equilibrium, a reduction in import barriers may be thought to lead to an increase in imports and a reduction in trade surplus. However, the general equilibrium effect can go in the opposite direction. We study how trade reforms affect current accounts by embedding a modified...

The real effective exchange rate (REER) is one of the most cited statistical constructs in open-economy macroeconomics. We show that the models used to compute these numbers are not rich enough to allow for the rising importance of global value chains. Moreover, because different sectors within...

When a sovereign faces the risk of debt default, it may be tempted to expropriate the private sector. This may be one reason for why international investment in private companies has to take into account the sovereign risk. But the likelihood of a transfer from the sovereign risk to corporate...