The authors are deeply grateful to Lin William Cong (the editor), an anonymous associate editor, and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions. The authors thank Chong-En Bai, Frédéric Boissay, Kaiji Chen, Tuo Chen, Mara Faccio, Hanming Fang, Haoyu Gao, Zhe Geng (discussant), Di Gong, Ran Gu (discussant), Tianyu Fan, Zhiguo He, Yunzhi Hu, Yi Huang (discussant), Lixing Li, Yao Lu, Wenlan Luo, Jun Pan, Jiaren Pang, Yuchao Peng, Jun “QJ” Qian, Meijun Qian, Xuesong Qian, Ji Shen, Zheng (Michael) Song, Yang Su, Tianyu Wang, Yanan Wang, Yongxiang Wang, Shang-Jin Wei, Laura Guiying Wu, Yang Xie, Wei Xiong, Wen Yao, Bernard Yeung, Tao Yuan (discussant), Bohui Zhang, Xiaobo Zhang, Yingguang Zhang, Hao Zhou, Xiaodong Zhu, and participants at the 2023 NBER Conference on the Chinese Economy at CUHK-Shenzhen, CBCF 2022, CFRN Annual Conference 2023, AMES 2023, CICF 2024, CCER Summer Institute, Tsinghua SEM, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, UIBE School of Banking and Finance, SUSTech Business School, and the University of Hong Kong for their helpful feedback. This paper was previously circulated as “Government Deleveraging and Non-SOE Liquidity Squeeze: Evidence from Subnational Debt and Government Contractors” and “Government Deleveraging and Corporate Distress.” All errors are the authors’ own.
