The effects of commercialization and migration in traditional agrarian economies such as China's during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been a subject of ferocious debate. Using data from Manchuria on soybean cultivation and exports, we employ difference-in-differences and...

By providing more public goods (irrigation), collective agriculture can deal with negative weather shocks more effectively. Yet, collective institutions are fraught with problems of work incentives, excessive grain procurement, and the like, which in one extreme historical instance had resulted...

A paradoxical feature of China's land reform of 1946–1952 is that it was conducted far more radically in the north, where land tenure relations were far less unequal, than in the south where inequality of land tenure was distinctly more acute. That landlords could only be identified in south...