Interpersonal networks can sustain cooperation among businesspeople, but how do potential entrants demonstrate their credibility and reliability? Taking a mix of approaches, we examine drinking at China’s business banquets, which entrants commonly practice to signal trustworthiness and...

Which industry sectors bribe the government and, in turn, are exploited by the government the most in China? Or, as commonly satirized by the people, which sectors pay the most “tributes” (shanggong) to government officials? This article attempts to answer these questions by proposing a...

This paper studies the evolution of China's city size distribution, measured by non-agricultural population, from 1949 to 2008. We employ time series Gini coefficients, panel unit root test of Gibrat's law, and analysis of distribution dynamics, to check the robustness of our findings. We find...

How and why did property rights to collectively owned informal housing become secure at the local level in China? The security of such property rights, especially those subject to strong state interference, is significantly associated with the strategic interaction of local governments and local...

Redevelopment of Chinese urban villages may or may not happen and may or may not take a long time. To explain the variation, I identify two types of redevelopment approaches: autonomous and collaborative. In autonomous approaches, villagers operate independently and rely on norms and extralegal...

This paper examines factors that shape people’s perceptions of government corruption in China. We are particularly interested in how people acquire information on local corruption, given the general lack of pertinent first-hand experience. We combine the data from a national survey in Mainland...

Authoritarian regimes may voluntarily fight corruption to consolidate their rule and enhance regime legitimacy. However, anti-corruption efforts are not necessarily based on the rule of law but follow certain political-economic logic. This research examines China, an authoritarian regime that...

Extant literature on authoritarian legislatures argues that dictators set up quasi-democratic institutions to co-opt opposition and attract investors. This study argues that dictators also nurture clientelistic ties with social groups useful to their rule, a previously overlooked function of...

Many sophisticated investors rely on scenario analysis to select a portfolio. These investors define prospective economic scenarios, assign probabilities to them, translate the scenarios into expected asset class returns, and select the portfolio with the highest expected return or expected...