Based on the survey of the literature on China's recent reform experience, this paper proposes to see China as a four sector economy under a semifederalist government. The four sectors are the agriculture, the state industry, the semistate rural industry and the private industry. The four...

Up-or-out contracts can improve human capital investment incentives but lead to suboptimal worker-employer separation. When job matching uncertainty is large relative to the return to human capital investment, spot contracts Pareto dominate up-or-out contracts. Otherwise, up-or-out contracts are...

We make four contributions in this paper. First, we provide a core of macroeconomic time series usable for systematic research on China. Second, we document, through various empirical methods, the robust findings about striking patterns of trend and cycle. Third, we build a theoretical model...

Soft budget constraint refers to the phenomenon that money losing inefficient projects keep on getting subsidies and operating. It was first phrased and analyzed by the late Hungarian economist Janos Kornai when he studied former socialist economies and by now, economists generally have agreed...