Subordination of business to political influence has remains pervasive in China. We construct a Schumpeterian-type model of growth with managerial time allocation between productive activities and building up political connections. The model predicts the impact of different patterns of state...

In geographically segmented credit markets, local real estate booms can deteriorate the funding conditions for small manufacturing firms and undermine their competitiveness. Using exogenous variation in the administrative land supply across 172 Chinese cities, we show that higher predicted real...

Even before the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis and ongoing European debt crisis, much attention has been given to the re-emergence of the Asian giants, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and India. Both countries have attained unprecedented growth and economic development-PRC and...

Can colonialism affect today’s urban outcomes? This paper examines the long-run impact of Concessions - foreign-run enclaves established in the late nineteenth century inside Chinese cities by European settlers for residence and investment purposes. They soon became the new economic hubs of...

In this paper, we consider a dynamic search-and-matching problem of a firm with its intermediate input supplier. In our model, a headquarter currently matched with a supplier, has an interest to find and collaborate with a more efficient partner. However, supplier switching through search and...

Global value chains have fundamentally transformed international trade and development in recent decades. We use matched firm-level customs and manufacturing survey data, together with Input-Output tables for China, to examine how Chinese firms position themselves in global production lines and...

Seminal theories of the firm posit that firm ownership is allocated to minimize contractual inefficiencies. Yet, it remains unclear how much the optimal ownership choice affects firm performance in practice. This paper provides a first quantification of the gains from optimal ownership within...

The large regional variation in minimum wage levels in the period 2002-08 in China implies that Chinese manufacturing firms experienced competitive shocks as a function of firm location and their low-wage employment share. We find that minimum wage hikes accelerate the input substitution from...

Understanding the factors that may produce a sustained rate of innovation is important for promoting economic development and growth. In this paper, we examine the role of human capital in firms' innovation by using a large sample of manufacturing firms from China. We use two firm-level datasets...

We present a heterogeneous-firm model in which management ability increases both pro- duction efficiency and product quality. Combining six micro-datasets on management prac- tices, production and trade in Chinese and American firms, we find broad support for the model's predictions. First,...