This paper examines the extent to which agency theory may explain CEO compensation in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China during the 1980s. We find that the sensitivity of CEO pay to firm performance decreases with the variance of performance. This is consistent with the prediction of a...

Johnson, McMillan and Woodruff (2002) examine the relative importance of property rights and external finance in several Eastern European countries, and find property rights to be overwhelmingly important, while external finance explains very little of firm reinvestment. McMillan and Woodruff...

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...

This paper uses a new data set of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms to evaluate the effects of labor downsizing on firms' technical efficiency, financial performance, and employee wages. Since downsizers and non-downsizers differ greatly in firm characteristics, we use...

We propose "Entertainment and Travel Costs" (ETC) expenditures as a measure of corruption in Chinese firms. These expenses are publicly reported in firms' accounting books, and on average they amount to about 3% of firms' total value added. We find that ETC is a mix that includes "grease money"...

Performance contracts (PCs) - contracts signed between the government and state enterprise managers - have been used widely in developing countries. China's experience with such contracts was one of the largest experiments with contracting in the public sector, affecting hundreds of thousands of...

Performance contracts (PCs) -- contracts signed between the government and state enterprise managers -- have been used widely in developing countries. China's expertise with such contracts was one of the largest experiments with contracting in the public sector, affecting hundreds of thousands...

Using a sample of Chinese state-owned enterprises spanning 1980 to 1994, we investigate the factors that determine the sources of finance for firm-level fixed investment, including retained earnings, bank finance, and government transfers. Direct government transfers were not significantly...

In the past decade, the World Bank has promoted improving business environments as a key strategy for development, which has led to a significant amount of investment in collecting firm-level investment climate surveys across countries. What lessons have emerged from the papers using these new...