The Republican Party has been the party most supportive of free trade in American politics for half a century. Donald Trump, the 45th US president, held a different stance from his party on free trade. We assess how Trump's China tariffs in mid-2018 impacted the performance of his party in its...

This study examines whether competitive experience affects gender difference in the economic preference and academic performance. By utilizing the provincial differences in college admission rates as an indication of competitive experience for students, we assess the effects on risk preference,...

We provide empirical evidence on the effectiveness of target-based performance evaluation for bureaucrats in the context of the Two Control Zones policy in China. In 2006, the Chinese central government made sulphur dixoide (SO2) emissions cuts a major performance evaluation criterion for...

In the modern economy, entrepreneurship is associated with individuals’ tendency to invest in risky projects. We conjecture that societies with a historical background in sea fishing are more likely than other societies to exhibit risk-taking behaviors in modern times, as the earliest sea...

This paper provides the first evidence about pure exporters (i.e., firms exporting all of their output to the foreign market) -- a phenomenon overlooked and cannot be explained in the existing literature. It then offers a generalized model of Melitz (2003) for examining the existence and...

Using data from a survey conducted by the World Bank in China, this paper shows that foreign ownership enhances firm productivity. We also find that only equity ownership from foreign firms can have such a positive impact, but not ownership from foreign institutional investors, banks, or...

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...

This paper studies whether changes in the exchange rate affect a country's export structure, using an arguably exogenous sudden appreciation of renminbi on July 21, 2005 as the main source of identification. Employing combined regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences approach, we...