China's economic performance of the past two decades presents a puzzle for the economics of transition and development: Enormous private business incentives were unleashed that have fueled rapid economic growth despite the fact that China has had very weak "conventional institutions" (such as...

Local officials in China have strongly supported new non-state firms, yet other officials in transition countries have often strongly hindered them. We argue that a likely cause of these sharp differences in behavior is differences in the source of government revenue. Local revenue in China came...

To better understand the relationship between different types of firm ownership and management turnover, this study classifies ownership along two dimensions: the type of owner and the concentration of ownership. Within this framework, a unique data set is used to study the impact of management...

To more thoroughly study the effect of ownership on management turnover, firms are classified by ownership simultaneously along two dimensions: types of owners and concentration of ownership. Under this new framework, a unique data set is used to study the sensitivity of management turnover to a...

We argue that personal (e.g., age, gender and education) and circumstantial (e.g., bureaucratic rank and sector of employment) factors affect the cost and the benefit of bribe-taking by the bureaucrats. The bureaucrat’s bribe-taking decision is modeled. A unique data set is used to test the...

We use a unique data set to study the implications of introducing managerial incentives and, in addition to incentives, better defined ownership for a firm's financial performance. The data set traces the ten-year history of 80 Chinese rural enterprises, known as township and village...

Because of the "too-early-to know" feature of innovation, the promotion of innovation in a given system critically depends on the screening mechanisms which terminate inefficient projects. Information imperfection together with sunk costs may cause commitment problems which relax financial...

We introduce a method of modelling coordination inside an organization as a process of "attribute matching." Using this method, we compare organizational forms (U-form and M-form) in coordinating changes. In our model, organizational forms affect the information structure of an organization and...

Each year, millions of Chinese high school students sit the National College Entrance Examination (CEE). For the majority of students, the CEE score is the single determinant in whether they gain admission into a college and to what college they enter. Despite the significance of the exam, there...

Each year, millions of Chinese high school students sit the National College Entrance Examination (CEE). For the majority of students, the CEE score is the single determinant in whether they gain admission into a college and to what college they enter. Despite the significance of the exam, there...