The consequences of granting democratic rights to citizens in otherwise authoritarian regimes has been extensively studied. Much less is know about the implications of retracting these rights when a government wants to recentralize power. Autonomous governance in rural China, introduced in the...

The global financial crisis since 2008 revived the debate on whether or not and to what extent financial development contributes to economic growth. This paper reviews different theoretical schools of thought and empirical findings on this nexus, building on which we aim to develop a unified,...

Based on three waves of a nationwide household survey in China, we demonstrate that social networks facilitate household financial market participation and risky asset holding. By constructing an index that considers various dimensions of social networks, our extensive empirical analysis...