This paper investigates the worldwide phenomenon of "political divergence'' between the East and the West. During the 8th to 10th centuries, Western Europe and China both achieved political stability, but they did so through dramatically different routes. Western Europe developed parliamentary...

This paper studies the peer effect of iPhone adoptions in China. We use a unique data set of iPhone adoption records from a provincial capital city in China, in a span of over four years starting from iPhone's first introduction to mainland China. We construct a social network using six month's...

We exploit a unique dataset of country-specific military expenditures and construct a proxy for international instability, measured as the growth of the global military expenditure to GDP ratio, to capture political tensions and international conflicts. Using the market indices of 44 countries,...

Total factor productivity (TFP) growth measures usually focus on a certain direction of optimization and ignore the general setting encompassing the input and output orientations simultaneously. This paper uses the generalized Luenberger-Hicks-Moorsteen (LHM) TFP indicator which is additively...

In this paper, we use a unique dataset covering joint ventures in two provinces of China, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, to test the effect of the institutional environment for domestic private firms on ownership structures of FDI projects. Unlike many studies on this subject, we approach the issue from...

Most of the economic analyses of the overseas-Chinese network focus on trade and investment flows at the country level. In this paper, we analyze the effects of the ethnic Chinese network at the firm level. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, we find that ethnic-Chinese FDI firms in China in...

Using a large firm-level panel dataset from the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, we examine the effect of financial distortions on FDI inflows in China's labor-intensive industries. Following Whited and Wu (2006), we estimate the investment Euler equation and construct a financing...