A void in the literature on the business environment is how it evolves over time. Focusing on China during its crucial two decades of transition (from the early 1990s to the early 2010s), this paper documents how the country's business environment and the characteristics of entrepreneurs...

A key to understand the evolution of an economy is the property rights institution and the contracting institution that the government set up to shape the business environment of private firms. Focusing on China during its crucial two decades of transition (from the early 1990s to the early...

Around the turn of the century, China experienced perhaps the largest labor restructuring program in the world. This paper uses a new data set of Chinese industrial enterprises to examine what leads to downsizing, and tries to understand the effects of labor downsizing on firms' technical...

Around the turn of the century, China experienced perhaps the largest labour restructuring program in the world. This paper uses a new dataset of Chinese industrial enterprises to examine what leads to downsizing, and tries to understand the effects of labour downsizing on firms' technical...

This article analyzes the experience with performance contracts between developing country governments and the managers of their state owned enterprises. It identifies how problems of information asymmetry, incentives, and commitment can lead to shirking. It applies this conceptual framework to...

The multitask principal-agent theory argues that incentive devices for the agent tend to be complementary due to the need for balanced allocation of effort among the tasks. A growing body of empirical literature appears to support this notion. However, when there can be several signals for each...

Because each of the agent's multitasks can have several measures, the multitask agency theory predicts that incentive devices based on these measures can be complements or substitutes. However, the existing empirical literature on multitask agency considers only complementarity. This paper...

The multitask agency theory argues that incentive devices for the agent need to be viewed as a system to induce balanced allocation of effort among the tasks. This important insight has not been incorporated into the empirical study of CEO compensation. Since there can be several measures for...