One recent policy tend to improve teacher quality is providing conditional grants to trainees in teacher colleges and commit them to working in disadvantaged areas upon graduation. Yet little is known whether such policies attract better trainees. This paper evaluates a conditional grant program...

In China, land is reallocated on either a full-scale or a partial basis. By employing a unique farm survey that deliberately draws a distinction between full-scale and partial land reallocations, and by decomposing their respective expropriation risk effects, we find that the significantly...

The banking sector traditionally dominated Indonesia's financial system, and until the 1990s the stock market remained of little significance. Re-opened in 1977 after two decades of inactivity, the stock exchange made little contribution to Indonesia's development until a series of reform and...

According to total factor productivity trends in Chinese agriculture, China achieved productivity gains both when collectivising (1954-58) and when decollectivising (1979-84) its agriculture. If the productivity gains from decollectivisation were due mainly to eliminating the incentive problems...

The last 30 years have witnessed an enormous growth in fixed-income markets. How long-term fixed-income strategies should be implemented for the welfare of investors has become a major concern of bond managers. This study makes use of stochastic optimal control to formulate a multi-period...

One theoretical implication of cointegration, according to Granger (1986), is that asset prices in an efficient market cannot be cointegrated. Using price data on US Treasury STRIPS with maturities from 2/15/1997 to 8/15/2015, it is found that a set of three STRIPS series is often cointegrated....

This paper presents theory and evidence from highly disaggregated Chinese data that tariff reductions induce exporters to upgrade product quality. The paper documents two stylized facts and develops a simple analytic framework to predict that import tariff reductions induce an incumbent...

Recent evaluations of traditional microloans have not found significant impacts on borrower production or incomes. We examine whether this can be remedied by delegating selection of borrowers for individual liability loans to local trader-lender agents incentivized by repayment-based...

IEMS Faculty Associate Prof. Naubahar Sharif looks into the challenges facing Hong Kong-owned manufacturing firms in Guangdong, assesses the role of innovation in firm survival, and recommends areas for improvement to policymakers in both Hong Kong and Guangdong.

Dr. Sasidaran Gopalan, an HKUST IEMS Post-Doctoral Fellow, examines some of the multi-dimensional implications of foreign bank entry in emerging markets. Foreign banks have been growing in importance in several emerging market economies and they are expected to play systemically important roles...