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...

The integration of two vertically linked business units allows the single owner to choose the compensation contracts of the managers of the two units coordinatively and thus internalizes a contracting externality when there is technology or production synergy. On the other hand, vertical...

In this article we show that in a finitely liquid market with asymmetrically informed investors, both the benefits and the costs of diversification vary with the return and risk of the investment opportunities of the firm's divisions. The benefits come from a reduced liquidity discount in the...

Investors who possess information about the value of an IPO can participate in the offering as well as trade strategically in the aftermarket. Both the bookbuilding and the fixed price IPO selling methods require more underpricing when aftermarket trading by informed investors is considered....

Using a proprietary database from a large Chinese state-owned bank, we examine whether information evolved from banking relationships predicts commercial loan default by industrial firms. We find that the bank's relationship information is significantly linked to the incidence of default, and...

In this article we show that in a finitely liquid market with asymmetrically informed investors, both the benefits and the costs of diversification vary with the return and risk of the investment opportunities of the firm's divisions. The benefits come from a reduced liquidity discount in the...

This paper investigates how a firm's capital structure choice affects the informational efficiency of its security prices in the secondary markets. We identify two new determinants of a firm's capital structure policy: liquidity (adverse selection) premium due to investors' anticipated losses to...

By studying the only mandatory pre-IPO market in the world – Taiwan's Emerging Stock Market (ESM), we document that pre-market prices are very informative about post-market prices and that the informativeness increases with a stock's liquidity. The ESM price-earnings ratio shortly before the...

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...