The aim of the paper is to explicitly disentangle the role of political and cultural boundaries as factors of fragmentation of economies within large countries. On the one hand, local protectionism plays a substantial role in many federations and decentralized states. On the other hand, if the...

We contribute to the rich literature on the role of political boundaries for international and inter-regional transactions by introducing a new methodology and testing it on an important case, China. This paper is based on new identification approach, which combines the use of sub-regional data...

In the past two decades, controversial evidence has been produced supporting the case for local protectionism in China. This paper overviews the most important contributions and presents a new approach which applies spatial econometrics on prefectural-level data. The main advantage of this...