This paper quantifies the causal effects of various types of investments in the road and railroad networks on economic growth in Chinese cities and regions. We separate out the influences of changes in access to markets that have come through better inter-regional and international transport...

We use comparable micro level panel data for 14 countries and a set of identically specified empirical models to investigate the relationship between exports and productivity. Our overall results are in line with the big picture that is by now familiar from the literature: Exporters are more...

We use the 2002 through 2014 Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys to construct comparable measures of household income and estimates of income inequality over this high-growth period. We focus on two questions: How have benefits from growth been distributed; and do changes in the structure...

We examine important changes in agriculture in Viet Nam in the context of ongoing structural changes in the economy. We use a household-level panel dataset and a quantitative framework to document the extent and consequences of factor misallocation in agriculture during the period between 2006...

We explore the relationship between the level of village inequality in 1986, and the subsequent growth of household incomes from 1986 to 1999. Using a detailed household-level data set from rural China, we find robust evidence that initial inequality is negatively related to subsequent household...

This paper provides non-parametric estimates of the total effects of famine in China on marital behavior of famine affected cohorts in rural areas of Sichuan and Anhui. The reduced form estimates incorporate general equilibrium and heterogeneous treatment effects, two important components of...

China has achieved impressive growth over the last three decades. However, there has been debate over the sources of the growth, and the role of the intensive versus extensive margin. Growth accounting exercises at the aggregate level (Rawski and Perkins, 2008; Bosworth and Collins, 2008) suggest an...

The paper estimates how parents adjust bride-prices and land divisions to compensate their sons for differences in their schooling investments in rural China. The main estimate implies that when a son receives one yuan less in schooling investment than his brother, he will obtain 0.7 yuan more...

We study the evolution of patenting in China from 1985-2019. We use a Large Language Model to measure patent importance based on patent abstracts and classify patent ownership using a comprehensive business registry. We highlight four insights. First, average patent importance declined from...

China's manufacturing sector has been a key source of the economy's dynamism. Analysis after 2007 however is hampered by problems in the key data source for empirical analysis, the National Bureau of Statistics' (NBS) annual survey of industrial firms. Issues include missing information on value...