题目：Investing Like China

时间：2016年3月30日  星期三     12:00 – 14:00

地点：明德主楼714

报告人：Wen Yao

摘要：This paper first documents three important facts about Chinese economy for the past decade: i) The skill premium in wage has been rising till 2008 but falls sharply afterwards; ii) non-residential structure investment contributes the most to the surge of the aggregate investment rate since 2008; iii) on the firm level, after 2008 the return to capital is lower for firms with lower employee education level. We then use a two-sector model to show quantitatively that these features in the data are caused by distortionary government investment policy in 2008, which subsidized infrastructure sectors implicitly so that they can absorb capital at a lower than market rate. We demonstrate that such a biased policy provides a strong incentive for infrastructure sector to invest, driving up the market interest rate and aggregate investment rate while the return to capital is declining. The resulting structural changes push up the relative demand of unskilled labor and thus leads to a rising trend in wage premium. Our model is calibrated to the Chinese data and the results are consistent with the facts listed above. Our results suggest that government has strong incentive to invest in the infrastructure sector if they are only interested in the short-run output level. Moreover, such a distortionary government policy could be welfare-improving if there are abundant unskilled labor supply in the economy.

报告人简介：Dr. Yao Wen is an assistant professor at School of Economic and Management at Tsinghua University. She received her B.S. in Computer Science from Fudan University and BEng in Computer Systems Engineering from University of Birmingham in 2006. She received her Ph.D. in Economics in 2011 from University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are International Finance, Macroeconomics, Computational Economics. Her work has appeared in top economic journals such as Review of Economic Dynamics. Before joining Tsinghua SEM, Dr. Yao Wen worked for Morgan Stanley, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the People’s Bank of China from 2008 to 2011. And She worked as a senior analyst in Bank of Canada from 2011 to 2012.