The emerging land-related unrest in China poses a pressing challenge on the legitimacy of the government. Through the perspective of good governance, the paper examines the role of land in government financing and its economic and political cost, as well as the erosion of government¡¯s...

China faces a water scarcity problem that is severe by international standards. Many factors, including rapid urbanization and environmental degradation etc, have been challenging the water service delivery in China. Since water scarcity and quality have impact on the poor, reforms to the water...

This short paper uses a newly compiled cross-country panel data on income distribution to explore the impact of inflation on income distribution and economic growth. We have found that inflation (1) worsens income distribution; (2) increases the income share of the rich; (3) has a negative but...

China has experienced one of the most remarkable increase in inequality over the last decade: the Gini coefficient increasing from 25.7 in 1984 to 37.8 in 1992. Using the recent developments in the theory of income distribution (Benerjee and Newman, 1993; Galor and Zeira, 1993) and a new panel data...

In this paper, we consider social status, the spirit of capitalism, fiscal policies, and asset pricing in a stochastic model of growth. With specific assumptions on the production technology, preferences, and stochastic shocks, we derive the explicit solutions to the growth rates of consumption...

In this paper, we study the optimal choices of the federal income tax, federal transfers, and local taxes in a dynamic model of capital accumulation and with explicit gamestructure s among multipleprivateage nts, multiplelocal governments, and the federal government. In general, the optimal...

This paper presents an infinite-horizon model of optimal capital accumulation with the social-status concern and the cash-in-advance constraint. When the cash-in-advance constraint applies to both consumption and investment, money is not supemeutral. If only consumption is subject to the...

This paper uses an encompassing framework developed by Murphy et al. (1991, 1993) to study corruption and how it affects income distribution and growth. We find that (1) corruption affects income distribution in an inverted U-shaped way, (2) corruption alone also explains a large proportion of...

This paper presents a group of models showing the strikingly different implications of foreign aid to the private sector and public sector. In the first model, with decentralized decision-making and without optimal choices of fiscal policies on behalf of the government, foreign aid to the...