This study addresses the apparent puzzle that China achieved spectacular economic performance despite weak institutions. Using a World Bank survey of 1566 manufacturing enterprises in 18 Chinese cities, we investigated whether property rights protection mattered for enterprise performance. We...

This paper revisits the important issue of whether economic development promotes democracy by using the system-GMM method, which is superior to the difference-GMM method when dependent variables (democracy in this paper) are highly persistent over time. With the same data set as that of Acemoglu...

Firm diversification across unrelated businesses is prevalent in many emerging economies, in contrast to the practices in developed economies. A fundamental difference between these two types of economies concerns with the existence of sound economic institutions including in particular the...

The existing studies on vertical integration focus on factors at the transaction parties’ level, such as asset specificity and contractual incompleteness. What is overlooked is the quality of the underlying institutions, in particular, contracting institutions. In this paper, using a World...

In this paper, we follow the theoretical framework proposed by Djankov et al. (2003) to investigate the role of the state in resolving business disputes and its impact on enterprise performance. Using a survey of private enterprises in China, we first construct an index to quantify the power of...

Family control of business is prevalent in developing economies, and one of the leading theories suggests that it is a response to weak contract enforcement in such economies. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of contract enforcement on the degree of family control of business using a...

This paper examines the impacts of economic institutions, including property rights protection and contract enforcement, on the location choice of foreign direct investment. From a data set of 6288 US multinationals investing in various China's regions for the period of 1993-2001, it is found...