This study addresses the apparent puzzle that China achieved spectacular economic performance despite weak institutions. Using a World Bank survey of 1,566 manufacturing enterprises in 18 Chinese cities, we investigated whether property rights protection mattered for enterprise performance. We...

This paper examines the impact of trade liberalization on U.S. Congressional elections. We find that U.S. counties subject to greater competition from China via a change in U.S. trade policy exhibit relative increases in turnout, the share of votes cast for Democrats and the probability that the...

Agglomeration brings costs (e.g., intensified local competition) as well as benefits (e.g., knowledge spillover). It is important to examine the net impact of agglomeration to understand the geographic distribution of economic activities. In this study, we use firm markup (defined as the ratio...

Using China Customs data that cover monthly transactions of all Chinese exporters, we investigate how Chinese exporters respond to U.S. antidumping investigations during the 2000-2006 period. Our difference-in-differences analysis uncovers a number of findings: the substantial trade-dampening...

The existing literature on firm survival focuses almost exclusively on firm- and industry-level determinants. What is generally overlooked, albeit extremely important for firm survival in developing countries, is the impact of institutional quality. Using data from manufacturing firms in China...

Using monthly transaction data covering all Chinese exporters over the 2000-2006 period, we investigate how Chinese exporters respond to U.S. antidumping investigations. We find that antidumping investigations cause a substantial decrease in the total export volume at the HS-6 digit product...

The case of China seems to present a counterexample to the literature on economic institutions as its private enterprises have achieved spectacular growth despite poor protection of private properties and difficulties in accessing external finance. In this study, we address this apparent puzzle...

Existing studies have often failed to find positive impacts of horizontal FDI on domestic firms. We argue that the two effects underpinning the impacts of horizontal FDI (i.e., the positive spillover effect and the negative competition effect) have different degrees of attenuation with distance....

China has maintained a financial system with favorable treatments toward state-owned enterprises. Albeit having been denied access to formal financing such as bank loans, China's non-state firms have grown rather fast. China's experience has often been interpreted as indicating that alternative...

Market economy models differ in the degree of the power of the government vis-à-vis the market in the economy. Under the classifications set forth by Glaeser and Shleifer (2002, 2003), and Djankov et al. (2003), these market models range from those emphasizing low government intervention in the...