Our work contributes to the literature relating output structure and economic development by showing that growth gains from upgrading are not unconditional. Relying on data from a panel of Chinese cities, we show that the level of capabilities available for domestic firms operating in ordinary...

During the last decade, the Chinese government has frequently changed the value added tax (VAT) refund levels offered to exporters. Indeed, China's VAT system is not neutral, in particular because the exporters may not receive complete refund of the domestic VAT paid on their inputs. This paper...

Since the mid-2000s, the center of gravity of China's economic growth has shifted from the coastline to the inland and the gap in GDP per capita between the two areas has narrowed. This macroeconomic catch-up reflects, with a time lag, the convergence process which has been at work in...

We propose the first evaluation using micro-level data of the expected growth gains from the consistency of activities with local comparative advantage. Using firm level data from Chinese customs over 2000-2006, we investigate the relationship between the export performance of firms and how...

We study how the 2004 reform of minimum wage rules in China has affected the survival, average wage, employment and productivity of local firms. To identify the causal effect of minimum wage growth, we use firm-level data for more than 160,000 manufacturing firms active in 2003 and complement...

Recently a small and growing empirical literature has attempted to analyze the role that quality plays in our understanding of trade. In particular, the recent work of Khandelwal (2010) has brought the insights of structural IO models of demand to bear into trade data. Our work builds on this...

In this paper, we estimate firm-level markups and test some micro-level predictions of a model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous markups. Our theoretical framework is an extended version of the Melitz and Ottaviano (2008) (MO) model that features both quality and...