One recent policy tend to improve teacher quality is providing conditional grants to trainees in teacher colleges and commit them to working in disadvantaged areas upon graduation. Yet little is known whether such policies attract better trainees. This paper evaluates a conditional grant program...

One recent policy tend to improve teacher quality is providing conditional grants to trainees in teacher colleges and commit them to working in disadvantaged areas upon graduation. Yet little is known whether such policies attract better trainees. This paper evaluates a conditional grant program...

Using data on over a million land transactions during 2004-2016 where local governments are the sole seller, we find that firms linked to members of China's supreme political elites — the Politburo — obtained a price discount ranging from 55.4% to 59.9% compared to those without the same...

The effect of China's civil examination system (keju) on human capital outcomes persists to this day. Using the variation in the density of jinshi—the highest qualification—across 278 Chinese prefectures in the Ming-Qing period (1368-1905) to proxy for the keju effect, and river distance to...

We show that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) experienced significantly faster growth in counties occupied by the Japanese Army than those garrisoned by the Kuomingtang (KMT) during the Sino-Japanese War (c. 1940-45), using the density of middle-to-upper rank Communist cadres (5.4%) and the...

We analyze a dataset constructed on the political turnovers of 3,623 county leaders in China during 1999-2008, and find that their career incentives — the institutional foundations of China's three decades of sustained economic growth — remain powerful. This is in spite of a policy shock...

With a per capita GDP estimated to be 20% higher than that of Great Britain, Song dynasty China (c. 960-1268) experienced a remarkable Commercial Revolution. We trace its origin to a tax reform forced upon the emperor by an exogenous war shock (the An-shi Rebellion of 755-763) during the...