One recent policy tend to improve teacher quality is providing conditional grants to trainees in teacher colleges and commit them to working in disadvantaged areas upon graduation. Yet little is known whether such policies attract better trainees. This paper evaluates a conditional grant program...

Using transactions conducted by publicly listed firms in China’s primary land market during 2000-2012 as a case study, we confirm that political connections are essentially corruption. By constructing unique measures to partial out the key factors confounding political connections, namely...