This paper documents that the spread of communism in China was partly caused by state failures in the early 20th century. It finds that famines became more frequent after China fell into warlord fragmentation, especially for prefectures with less rugged borders and those facing stronger military...

Although previous research has demonstrated the health benefits of water treatment programs, relatively little is known about the effect of water treatment on education. This paper examines the educational benefits to rural youth in China of a major drinking water treatment program started in...

This paper utilizes a natural experiment to examine the role of the protection of property rights in promoting investment. In order to explore a title-granting scheme in Shenzhen, China, I collect a sample of 83 listed SOE firms, with 32 of them holding about-to-be-entitled lands. Those...

We demonstrate the negative impact of air pollution on China’s Initial Public Offering review process. We find that the pass rate of firms with connection to the review committee is increased by 10 percentage points when reviewed on a polluted day. The effect only exists for air pollution...

This paper considers lending to finance projects in a setting where repayment enforcement appears impossible. The loan was illegal and thus legally unenforceable. Creditors were incapable of applying private coercion to force repayment. Borrowers lacked both collateral and reputation capital....

Using a uniquely collected dataset on Chinese movies, we investigate the impact of studios’ profit orientation on their movie themes under censorship. The Value Adjustment Mechanism (VAM), which links executives’ incomes with studios’ box office within 5 years after the studios are...