We demonstrate how government deleveraging causes corporate distress in a distorted financial market. Our difference-in-differences (DID) analysis exploits China's top-down deleveraging policy in 2017, which targets shadow bank financing and reduces local governments' borrowing capacity. We find...

Autocracies have diverse records of economic growth. This paper provides a theory of endogenous coalition formation to explain economic performance in autocracy. The nature of the ruling coalition that the autocrat relies on to rule the society and extract rents affects the degree of...