China's reform worked and produced one of the most impressive growth in the largest developing and transition economy in the world in the past twenty-two years. That China has managed to grow so rapidly despite the absence of many conventional institutions such as rule of law and secure private...

We study the relationship between ownership of firms and institutional environment by examining China's rural non-farm sector, which consists of both private enterprises and community government-run enterprises (known as township-village enterprises, or TVES). Our results showed that all the...

In 1994 China began a profound reform of its state-owned enterprises. We first describe and characterize this progress in two areas: privatization of small state-owned enterprises at the county level and mass layoffs of excess state workers at the city level. Local governments have initiated...

We develop a simple model to analyze the "dual-track" approach to transition to a market economy as a mechanism for implementing efficient Pareto-improving economic reform, that is, reform achieving efficiency without creating losers. The approach, based on the continued enforcement of the...

China's remarkable economic growth occurred despite (1) the lack of rule of law to secure property rights against state encroachment; and (2) government ownership of most new and successful non-state firms. We develop a theory of ownership under state predation that incorporates these two...

We introduce a method of modelling coordination inside an organization as a process of "attribute matching." Using this method, we compare organizational forms (U-form and M-form) in coordinating changes. In our model, organizational forms affect the information structure of an organization and...

China's economic performance of the past two decades presents a puzzle for the economics of transition and development: Enormous private business incentives were unleashed that have fueled rapid economic growth despite the fact that China has had very weak "conventional institutions" (such as...

We study China's township-village enterprises (TVES) from an organizational perspective with a focus on governance. Unlike most previous studies, we interpret the firm boundaries of TVEs at the community level rather than the enterprise level. From this perspective, we analyze the central role...