Performance contracts (PCs) - contracts signed between the government and state enterprise managers - have been used widely in developing countries. China's experience with such contracts was one of the largest experiments with contracting in the public sector, affecting hundreds of thousands of...

Based on outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) data of Chinese manufacturing companies in the period of 2001-20142016, this paper examines the impact of capital intensity on the casual relationship between outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) and productivity. Results show that, first,...

Performance contracts (PCs) -- contracts signed between the government and state enterprise managers -- have been used widely in developing countries. China's expertise with such contracts was one of the largest experiments with contracting in the public sector, affecting hundreds of thousands...

Johnson, McMillan and Woodruff (2002) examine the relative importance of property rights and external finance in several Eastern European countries, and find property rights to be overwhelmingly important, while external finance explains very little of firm reinvestment. McMillan and Woodruff...

We employ the “social conditions of innovative enterprise” framework to analyze the key determinants of China’s development path from the economic reforms of 1978 to the present. First, we focus on how government investments in human capabilities and physical infrastructure provided...

A popular explanation for China's rapid economic growth in recent years has been the dramatic increase in the number of private domestic and foreign-owned firms and a decline in the state-owned sector. However, recent evidence suggest that China's state-owned enterprise (SOEs) are in fact...

Since its inception in the early 1980s, the success of China's enterprise reforms remains hotly debated. This paper introduces a new element into the analysis of state-owned enterprise performance by drawing on the recent increase in interregional income disparities. It is argued that as a...

Agricultural production outsourcing, a new means of agricultural production, can optimise the allocation of resources, reduce agricultural production costs, and improve agricultural productivity. However, farmers' outsourcing behaviours are strongly interfered with by many factors such as...

Why are we rich and others poor? What is preventing the less-developed countries from catching up with the more developed? How did we become rich? Underlying these questions are more fundamental ones: What is the nature of economic progress? What are its causes? I seek the answers to these...

This paper presents theory and evidence from highly disaggregated Chinese data that tighter credit constrains force firms to produce lower quality. The paper modifies Melitz's (2003) model of trade with heterogeneous firms by introducing quality choice and credit constraints. The quality sorting...