Hot Money and Quantitative Easing: The Spillover Effects of U.S. Monetary Policy on the Chinese Economy Steven Wei Ho, Ji Zhang, Hao Zhou November 26th, 2017 Abstract We develop a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FA-VAR) model to estimate the effects that unanticipated changes in U.S. mon- etary policy and economic policy uncertainty have on the Chinese housing, equity, and loan markets. We find the decline in the U.S. policy rate since the Great Recession has led to a significant increase in Chinese housing investment. One possible reason for this effect is the substantial increase in the inflow of ``hot money'' into China. The responses of Chinese variables to U.S. shocks at the zero lower bound are different from those responses in normal times. JEL codes: F3, C3, E4 Keyword: International policy spillover, Chinese real estate mar- ket, U.S. monetary policy, policy uncertainty ∗We thank Serena Ng and Jushan Bai for helpful comments on the methodology. We are grateful to two anonymous referees and editor Pok-Sang Lam, whose com- ments have greatly improved the paper. We also thank Mark Wynne, Donald Kohn, Canlin Li (discussant), Hongyi Chen, Jianfeng Yu, and Jian Wang for helpful com- ments and feedbacks. We are also grateful for the participants at CICF 2015 and SNDE 2016 for kind suggestions. Correspondence, Ho: Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Columbia University, 420 West 118th Street Office 1233, Mail Code 3308, New York, NY 10027, email(
[email protected]); Zhang: Assis- tant Professor, PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University, 43 Chengfu Road, Beijing, 100083, China, email(
[email protected]); Zhou: Unigroup Chair Professor, PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University, 43 Chengfu Road, Beijing, 100083, China, email(
[email protected]).