Through the lens of the theory of the firm, I examine how a series of reforms affected the performance of Chinese state-owned enterprises with a panel dataset of more than 500 firms. The study finds that performance improved with various reforms such as increasing competition, appointing new...

The multitask principal-agent theory argues that incentive devices for the agent tend to be complementary due to the need for balanced allocation of effort among the tasks. A growing body of empirical literature appears to support this notion. However, when there can be several signals for each...