一、主题：Earnings Inequality and China’s Preferential Lending Policy

二、主讲人：姚雯，美国宾夕法尼亚大学经济学博士，现任清华大学经管学院经济系副教授。她的研究领域包括宏观经济学，国际金融以及中国经济。目前已有论文发表于Journal of Development Economics、Journal of International Economics、Review of Economic Dynamics 等国际一流经济学期刊。

三、时间：2020年5月7日星期四，上午9:30-11:30
四、地点：腾讯会议【具体房间临时通知】
五、主持人：彭俞超，中央财经大学金融学院副教授 

Abstract: Wages have been distributed increasingly unequally over the past decades for most countries. While policymakers have tried different methods to stop the earnings inequality from widening, the effects have been minimal. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism through which a preferential lending policy reduces the earnings inequality, inspired by the case of China. As most countries have, China has experienced increasing earnings inequality over the past decades; however, the inequality started to decline substantially after 2009. We argue that this change reflects the following important institutional change in China: since 2009, the local governments have been granted the ability to offer their preferred firms cheap credit. Since many of these preferred firms are unskilled-labor intensive, with a lower financing cost, they increase their investment and hire more unskilled workers, thereby reducing the earnings inequality. We incorporate this mechanism into a two-sector model and show quantitatively that our model can account for most of the decline of the earnings inequality observed in the data. Moreover, the model also predicts a surge in the aggregate investment rate, which is also in line with the data.