Fiscal decentralization introduced as part of China's economic reform since 1979 has unleashed strong incentives for China's local governments to pursue economic development, but the same incentives have also led to local protectionist policies inhibiting the process of regional specialization....

China's success in attracting foreign direct investment has been cast in doubt as mainly a transfer of capital, not knowhow, because its financial system is incapable of allocating domestic savings and hard-earned foreign reserves to domestic enterprises. To shed light on this debate, we examine...

In view of the importance of intra-firm trade and export-platform FDI conducted by multinationals, we investigate how domestic firms and foreign affiliates exhibited differential impacts of export entry and exit on productivity changes. Using a comprehensive dataset from China's manufacturing...

This paper investigates the relevance of two leading theories of city–industry growth (i.e., specialization and diversity theories) in accounting for the fast yet uneven growth of industries in China's cities. Using a comprehensive dataset of manufacturing industries in 231 China's cities for...

This paper empirically studies union effects on the performance of, and employment relations in, China's private enterprises. The study finds a positive and statistically significant union effect on labor productivity, but not on profitability. It further finds that unions lead to better...

China's collectively-owned enterprises are unconventional, as they are nominally owned by those people residing in the areas where the enterprises are located but effectively controlled by the local governments. This study finds that collectively-owned enterprises, once being privatized,...

This paper utilizes the non-linear estimation method to simulate the Zipf distribution, and constructs an alternative measure of Hirschman–Herfindahl index (HHI), in order to reveal the real changes in monopoly of China's industrial markets. Based on the annual waves of the Chinese Industrial...

Each year, millions of Chinese high school students sit the National College Entrance Examination (CEE). For the majority of students, the CEE score is the single determinant in whether they gain admission into a college and to what college they enter. The purpose of this paper is to determine...

This paper investigates the spatial structure of the provincial economic growth and the spatial spillover in China from 1998 to 2008. First, we apply Moran's index to detect the positive spatial autocorrelations across the provinces of China. Second, we build a new economic geography model and...