I present a study of ownership of firms under government rent seeking. Using its control of regulated inputs, a government agency extracts rents from a manager who undertakes an investment. Such a government rent seeking activity leads to a typical hold-up problem. Government ownership is shown...

This paper documents the financial and institutional developments of China during the past two decades, when China was successfully transformed from a rigid centralplanning economy to a dynamic market economy following its unique path. We empirically examine the relationship between financial...

We conduct a large-scale field experiment to investigate how Chinese firms respond to job applications from ethnic minority and Han applicants for jobs posted on a large Chinese Internet job board. We denote ethnicity by means of names that are typically Han Chinese and distinctively Mongolian,...

This paper investigates the determinants of employment choice of rural migrant workers across state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and various subtypes of non-state owned enterprises (non-SOEs) by taking into account unobservable characteristics that link the choice to migrate with the choice of...

Institutional change has taken place gradually since 1978 for State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the Industrial Sector of China. In this paper we estimate the effect of deep reform (the right to hire and fire labour, buy and sell capital and operate on international markets) on the productivity...

The role of government shareholding in corporate performance is central to an understanding of China?s newly privatized large firms. In this paper, we analyze shareholders as agents that can both harm and benefit companies. We examine the ownership structure of 826 listed corporations and find...

Using data on 451 Chinese privatizations over the period 1994-2002, this paper empirically investigates the firm and stock market characteristics that detfirmine the size of the portion of new shares sold to the general public and underpricing at SIP-time. We find that poor perfirmance and...

This paper uses a unique micro-level data-set on Chinese firms to test for the existence of a "political-pecking order" in the allocation of credit. Our findings are threefold. Firstly, private Chinese firms are credit constrained while State-owned firms and foreign-owned firms in China are not;...

This paper introduces and critically analyzes an emerging form of global infrastructure development by China's infrastructure construction companies, known as "integrated investment, construction, and operation" (IICO). This model has been promoted by the Chinese infrastructure industry,...