We empirically test whether the Department of Justice (DOJ) engages in ethnic prejudice against Chinese in its prosecutorial decisions under the Economic Espionage Act (EEA) of 1996. Using data of EEA cases from November 1996 to June 2021, we conduct Becker's outcome test for evidence of ethnic...

We argue that inter-jurisdictional competition in a regionally decentralized authoritarian regime distorts local politicians' incentives in resource allocation among firms from their own city and a competing city. We develop a tournament model of project selection that captures the driving...

We study the impact of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) on the quality of entrepreneurship in China. Using long series of firm registration and performance data, we document that the massive SOE downsizing in the late 1990s significantly improved the quality of entrepreneur- ship. Compared with...