The authors believe that the wage system and the price structure are the two most critical variables that will influence the future development and success or failure of China's economic modernization. They explore current wages among urban workers and the determinants of the bonus system in...

The consumption structure in China has undergone a dramatic change since the economic reform started in 1979. Durable goods ownership, an important aspect of overall consumption, has experienced an even greater change both in variety and quantity. The article, using data from a 1984 household...

We argue that inter-jurisdictional competition in a regionally decentralized authoritarian regime distorts local politicians' incentives in resource allocation among firms from their own city and a competing city. We develop a tournament model of project selection that captures the driving...

We study the impact of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) on the quality of entrepreneurship in China. Using long series of firm registration and performance data, we document that the massive SOE downsizing in the late 1990s significantly improved the quality of entrepreneur- ship. Compared with...

Using China's expansion of the high-speed rail system (HSR) as a quasi-natural experiment, we analyze the comprehensive vehicle registration data from 2010 to 2023 to estimate the causal impact of HSR connectivity on the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs). Implementing several identification...

We decode China's industrial policies from 2000 to 2022 by employing large language models (LLMs) to extract and analyze rich information from a comprehensive dataset of 3 million documents issued by central, provincial, and municipal governments. Through careful prompt engineering, multistage...