Challenges of working with the Chinese NBS firm-level data

By L. Brandt, Johannes Van Biesebroeck, Yifan Zhang. 2014

309 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Over the reform period, industry has been the source of 40% of GDP, and has contributed 90% of China's exports. Annual firm-level surveys that begin in 1992, complemented with industry-wide census in 1995, 2004 and 2008, are rich sources of data on firm behavior. It is well-known that working with Chinese data requires overcoming difficult measurement issues. Macroeconomic series, for example, are often suspected of suffering from reporting bias and political interference. Working with the firm-level data has its own challenges. In this paper, we provide an introduction to these data sets. We discuss and illustrate several of the issues that make comparability over time difficult and suggest solutions. The importance of a particular measurement issue often depends on the exact application. We illustrate this point by tracing the evolution of the relative productivity level of entrants and incumbents over time, distinguishing between changes in actual performance and changes driven by measurement problems. We conclude by identifying a few promising areas of future research and margins on which collaboration among users to improve these data might be beneficial.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3d4df7b49ffcdca02eed014fb9d2e5d9800f52c4

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Citations in the corpus

The Sources of Capital Misallocation (2019, unknown): “A panel is constructed following almost directly the method outlined in Brandt, Van Biesebroeck, and Zhang ( 2014 ) , which also contains an excellent overview of the data for the interested reader.”
Growing like China: Firm performance and global production line position (2020, methodology): “As noted earlier, these metrics are very similar in the matched sample of non-intermediary two-way traders with both CCTS customs and ASIF production data (Columns 7–9). y (2012) and Antràs et al. (2012) moreover show that the upstreamness measure defined in (1) is the unique solution to the followi”
Improving or disappearing: Firm-level adjustments to minimum wages in China (2018, methodology): “A comparison to the 2004 full census of industrial firms reveals that these firms account for 20% of all industrial firms, employ roughly 71% of the industrial workforce and generate 91% of output and 98% of exports (Brandt et al., 2012).(8) We use information on the number of employees, production,”