The reform of China's enterprise system increasingly reflects the outcome of China's emerging property rights market. We distinguish between a centrally-directed reform strategy, with characteristics similar to those of a Pigouvian tax, and a market-driven reform process, which captures the...

Economists studying socialist transition have established a paradigmatic view that emphasizes flexible prices, openness to international trade, minimal government intervention in market operations, and private ownership of productive resources. China's, the largest and best performing transition...

Chinese attitudes toward the treatment of men and women in the workplace reflect two divergent perspectives. The legacy of China's past includes a strong tendency to favor male over female workers, while over the last four decades China's government has vigorously propagated an ideology of...

After briefly surveying the current circumstances of China' s state-owned industrial enterprises, this paper offers a series of policy recommendations organized around two objectives: raising the returns to capital and promoting the development of market-supporting institutions. The author...

This paper uses a survey of 1,826 firms distributed over ten East Asian metropolitan areas – Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Seoul, and five Chinese cities – to investigate the sources of firm-level R&D capabilities. The analysis identifies the impact of 23 survey variables, classified by...

This paper characterizes a key feature of the classic socialist economy and state-owned enterprise, namely that of missing markets in labor quality. Under the socialist regime in which students and workers were assigned to work units, the rights of managers to monitor and reward workers were...

During the 1980s, the restructuring of Chinese industry was driven principally by the entry of new enterprises into the enterprise system and by the restructuring of managerial incentives. In 1993, China’s leadership formally inaugurated the shareholding experiment. This paper examines the...