Firms have increasingly conducted different stages of production in different countries. In particular, they set up operations in low-cost countries (those operations are referred to as foreign affiliates in those countries) as platforms for export. What is the exporting behavior of foreign...

This paper empirically studies union effects on the performance of, and employment relations in, China’s private enterprises. The study finds a positive and statistically significant union effect on labor productivity, but not on profitability. It further finds that unions lead to better...

It has been taken for granted in the literature on the determinants of vertical integration that the effectiveness of contract enforcement is guaranteed, which is far from true even in some developed countries. In this paper, using a World Bank data set of manufacturing firms in China, we...

Using an extensive data set on foreign invested enterprises (FIEs) in the Chinese mainland, we compare the sensitivities of the location choice of foreign direct investment (FDI) from six major source countries/areas (Hong Kong, Taiwan, US, EU, Japan and Korea) toward the variation in the...

This paper, by using annual surveys of manufacturing firms from 1998 to 2005 in China, first documents a positive correlation between industrial agglomeration and firm size, which is previously found in developed economies. Next, by using the instrumental variable estimations, we identify that...

Property rights protection has been found to promote economic growth at the macro level, and affect the incentive for investment at the micro level. What is not clear is whether and how property rights protection affects a firm's allocation of investment across industries for a given size of...

Theoretical and empirical research in the past decades has advanced our understanding of what determines the vertical boundary of a firm. An equally important but much less understood issue is the impacts of vertical integration on firm performance, mainly because the decision on vertical...

This paper investigates the relevance of the two leading theories for city-industry growth (i.e., specialization and diversity theories) in accounting for the fast yet uneven growth of industries in China's cities. Using the data set of 29 two-digit manufacturing industries in 231 China's cities...

The investigation of the value of political connections has attracted economists' interests in the recent years. This paper, by using a survey of Chinese private firms in 2004, empirically studies the impact of political connections (measured as the deputy to the Chinese People's Congress) on...

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...