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...

In this paper, we investigate whether there is a pollution haven effect, specifically, the effect of environmental regulations on firm location. Our identification uses the Two Control Zones (TCZ) policy implemented by the Chinese government in 1998. The difference-in-differences (DID)...

In view of the importance of intra-firm trade and export-platform FDI conducted by multinationals, we investigate how domestic firms and foreign affiliates exhibited differential impacts of export entry and exit on productivity changes. Using a comprehensive dataset from China's manufacturing...

This paper investigates the relevance of two leading theories of city–industry growth (i.e., specialization and diversity theories) in accounting for the fast yet uneven growth of industries in China's cities. Using a comprehensive dataset of manufacturing industries in 231 China's cities for...

Property rights institutions significantly hinder firm productivity but not contracting institutions in China. Weakening property rights institutions by a standard deviation lowers firm productivity by 34.4% of its corresponding standard deviation. Small firms find weak property rights...

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...