This paper empirically estimates the returns to membership of the Chinese Communist Party using unique twins data that the authors collected from urban China. Our ordinary least squares estimate shows that being a Party member increases earnings by 28.1 percent, but when we use a...

Two empirical questions concerning the equity and housing have been studied extensively: (1) Are the price and return serially correlated, and (2) What is the optimal weight of housing in the portfolio? The answer to the second question crucially depends on the cross-correlation of assets. This...