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The 129th NSD Policy Talk: Capital Scarcity and Industrial Decline: Evidence from 172 Real Estate Booms in China

2018-11-02

 

The 129th NSD Policy Talk

 Capital Scarcity and Industrial Decline: Evidence from 172 Real Estate Booms in China

Presenter: Professor Harald Hau

SFI Chaired Professor of Finance and Economics, University of Geneva

Language: English

15:30-17:00, 05 November 2018

Zhifuxuan Classroom, National School of Development, Peking University

【Abstract】

In geographically segmented credit markets, local real estate booms can divert capital away from manufacturing firms, create capital scarcity, increase local real interest rates, lower real wages, and cause underinvestment and relative decline in the industrial sector. Using exogenous variation in the administrative land supply across 172 Chinese cities, we show that the predicted variation in real estate prices does indeed cause substantially higher capital costs for manufacturing firms, reduce their bank lending, lower their capital intensity and labor productivity, weaken firms’ financial performance, and reduce their TFP growth by economically significant magnitudes. This evidence highlights macroeconomic stability concerns associated with real estate booms.

 

【Introduction of Presenter】

Harald Hau is a Professor of Economics and Finance at the Geneva School of Economics and Management (GSEM) of the University of Geneva, the managing director of the Geneva Finance Research Institute (GFRI) and holds a senior chair at the Swiss Finance Institute (SFI).

 

His research interests are in international finance, financial markets and financial stability. After his PhD at Princeton University in 1996 with Kenneth Rogoff as thesis advisor, he first taught at the French business school ESSEC and from 2001 to 2011 at INSEAD in Fountainebleau and Singapore. He was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund, the Wim Duisenberg Fellow at the European Central Bank and a research fellow at the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research.

 

He is a fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London, and the Center for Economic Studies (CES), Munich. In his research, he contributes to academic and professional journals such as the American Economic Review, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Economic Policy, and others.