This paper investigates the institutional causes of China's Great Famine. It presents two empirical findings: 1) in 1959, when the famine began, food production was almost three times more than population subsistence needs; and 2) regions with higher per capita food production that year suffered...

We investigate why and how the financial conditions of developing and emerging market countries (peripheral countries) can be affected by the movements in the center economies - the U.S., Japan, the Eurozone, and China. We apply a two-step approach. First, we estimate the sensitivity of...

Where legal systems and market forces enforce contracts inadequately, vertical integration can circumvent these transaction difficulties. But, such environments often also feature highly interventionist government, and even corruption. Vertical integration might then enhance returns to political...

Weak institutions ought to deter foreign direction investment (FDI), and mass media stories highlight China's institutional deficiencies, yet China is now one of the world's largest FDI destinations. This incongruity characterizes China's paradoxical growth. Cross-country regressions show that...

Recent research has demonstrated the importance of institutional quality at the country level for both the volume of trade and the ability to trade in differentiated goods that rely on contract enforcement. This paper takes advantage of cross-provincial variation in institutional quality in...