This paper provides the first evidence about pure exporters (i.e., firms exporting all of their output to the foreign market) -- a phenomenon overlooked and cannot be explained in the existing literature. It then offers a generalized model of Melitz (2003) for examining the existence and...

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 estimates the value of superstitions by studying the auctions of vehicle license plates. We show that the value of superstitions is economically significant, which in turn justifies their persistence in human civilization. We also show that such a value, though based inherently on...

We construct a structural model that allows us to jointly estimate the demand for smartphones and paid apps using a Bayesian approach. Our data comes from more than 500 college students in Hong Kong and Shanghai. We find that the moral cost rather than the monetary cost of jailbreaking...

Using China Customs data that cover monthly transactions of all Chinese exporters, we investigate how Chinese exporters respond to U.S. antidumping investigations during the 2000-2006 period. Our difference-in-differences analysis uncovers a number of findings: (1) the substantial...

Agglomeration brings costs (e.g., intensified local competition) as well as benefits (e.g., knowledge spillover). It is important to examine the net impact of agglomeration to understand the geographic distribution of economic activities. In this study, we use firm markup (defined as the ratio...

In this paper, we investigate whether there is a pollution haven effect, specifically, the effect of environmental regulations on firm location. Our identification uses the Two Control Zones (TCZ) policy implemented by the Chinese government in 1998. The difference-in-differences (DID)...

We are living in an increasingly globalized world yet with constant and endless conflicts among countries. While studies have uncovered the impacts of various economic factors and policy regimes on trade and investment, a much less understood issue is whether conflicts among countries have any,...