The rational and political decision models are developed and tested for the land tenure choice in rural China. A novelty of the test is to link the collective decision with general relative factor scarcities. Competing hypotheses are developed for the two models and tested with panel data...

China has experimented with village elections for nearly 20 years. Using village and household survey data collected from 48 villages of 8 Chinese provinces for the period 1986-2002, this paper studies how the introduction of elections affects village governance and income distribution in...

This paper shows that the domestic and foreign trade liberalization of the Chinese economy since the late 1970s has led to much dynamism among small and medium firms. Such firms have grown at a rapid pace and have increased their share of value added in the Chinese economy. At the same time,...

Based on a survey of 1,268 firms in 12 cities, this article empirically studies unions’ effects on worker welfare in China. Regressions carried out on a rich set of specifications show that unionization is significantly associated with higher hourly wages and larger pension coverage and weakly...

This study examines how the economic effects of elections in rural China depend on voter heterogeneity, for which we proxy with religious fractionalization. We first document religious composition and the introduction of village-level elections for a nearly nationally representative sample of...

In this paper, we argue that the export-oriented growth model in China is an unavoidable choice for China given its demographics and low level of urbanisation. The low dependency ratio and low urbanisation rate jointly determine a large amount of supply of labour and the slow growth of labour...