The Great Leap Forward (GLF) disaster, characterized by a collapse of grain output, and the associated famine in China between 1959 and 1961, can be attributed to a systemic failure in central planning. Encouraged by unrealistic expectations for agricultural productivity gains from...

Gradual change has been a hallmark of the Chinese reform experience, and China's success in its sequential approach makes it unique among the former command economies. Since 1979, with the inception of the continuing era of reform, the Chinese economy has flourished. Growth has averaged nine...

In this paper, we study the initial-conditions problem, a complication associated with left-censored or interrupted spells in the econometric analysis of labor market transitions. In the presence of unobserved individual-specific heterogeneity, no consistent estimators have been previously...