Webinar Series
Going Bankrupt in China
In China, where local courts traditionally suffer from the interference of local governments when dealing with bankruptcy cases, the lack of an efficient and independent judicial system is an obstacle to economic and financial development. Local politicians have strong incentives to delay liquidation and keep low-productivity and financially distressed state-owned firms in operation to maintain employment, avoid social unrest, and promote their political careers. In the last decade, however, in an attempt to increase the legal protection of creditors, China introduced specialized bankruptcy courts in different prefecture-level cities. Compared to traditional civil courts, specialized courts might be run by better-trained judges and are part of an effort by the central government to limit local governments' interventions in bankruptcy cases. Join us for a conversation with Jacopo Ponticelli and Yueran Ma on the new research that investigates China's traditional and new treatments of corporate insolvency, and how the results have important policy implications.
2021
Session Chair: Professor Zhiguo HE
Fuji Bank and Heller Professor of Finance and Jeuck Faculty Fellow, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago and Senior Fellow, ABFER
Associate Professor Jacopo PONTICELLI, Associate Professor of Finance, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
Co-author:
Assistant Professor Bo LI, Assistant Professor, PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University
Discussant:
Assistant Professor Yueran MA, Assistant Professor of Finance and Liew Family Junior Faculty Fellow, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago
Speakers
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Associate Professor Jacopo Ponticelli
Associate Professor of Finance, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
Jacopo Ponticelli joined Kellogg School of Management in 2017 as an Associate Professor of Finance. He is an applied economist who primarily studies corporate finance and development economics. His research interests include law and finance, financial development, and economic growth.
His work has been published in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. Before joining Kellogg School of Management, he served as an Assistant Professor of Finance and Cohen and Keenoy Scholar at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Professor Ponticelli holds a PhD in Economics from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain). -
Assistant Professor Yueran MA
Assistant Professor of Finance and Liew Family Junior Faculty Fellow, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Yueran Ma’s main research interest is empirical studies at the intersection of finance and macroeconomics. Her work covers topics including low interest rates and financial markets, debt contracts and macroeconomic implications, non-financial firms and financial frictions, and expectations in finance and macroeconomics. Her research often draws on insights from behavioral economics, and applies new approaches such as simple randomized experiments. She has also worked on questions in real estate and urban economics. She received B.A. summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in Applied Mathematics in 2014, and Ph.D. in Business Economics in 2018, from Harvard University.
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Professor Zhiguo HE
Fuji Bank and Heller Professor of Finance and Jeuck Faculty Fellow, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago and Senior Fellow, ABFER
Zhiguo He is interested in the implications of agency frictions and debt maturities in financial markets and macroeconomics with a special focus on contract theory and banking. His recent research focuses on the role of financial institutions in the 2007/08 global financial crisis. He teaches an elective MBA course, “Chinese Economy and Financial Markets,” and is conducting academic research on Chinese financial markets including the stock market, local government debt, shadow banking, and interbank markets together with recent regulation changes. Professor He has also been writing academic articles on new progress in the area of cryptocurrency and blockchains.
His research has been published in leading academic journals including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics, and Management Science. He has been an associate editor for the Review of Financial Studies and Management Science and currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Finance. He serves as the guest editor of the Review of Finance for the “Special Issue on China” in 2020-2021.
Professor He received his bachelor and master degrees from the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University before receiving his PhD from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2008. He has been named a 2014 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and has won numerous awards for his outstanding scholastic record, including the Lehman Brothers Fellowship for Research Excellence in Finance in 2007, the Swiss Finance Institute Outstanding Paper Award in 2012, the Smith-Breeden First Prize in 2012, and the Brattle Group First Prize in 2014. Before joining the Chicago Booth faculty in 2008, he worked as a stock analyst at the China International Capital Corporation in Beijing in 2001 and visited the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University as a post-doctoral fellow.
In Autumn 2015 Professor He was the Dean’s distinguished visiting scholar at Stanford University, Graduate School of Business, and in winter 2020 he is a visiting professor of finance at Yale University, School of Management. In January 2020, he testified at U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) Hearing on “China’s Quest for Capital: Motivations, Methods, and Implications.”
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Session Format
Each session lasts for an hour (25 minutes for the author, 25 minutes for the discussant and 15 minutes for participants' Q&A). Sessions will be recorded and posted on ABFER's web, except in cases where speakers or discussants request us not to.
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