Das Konzept der Medical Savings Accounts als Instrument zur Finanzierung von Gesundheitssystemen hat in den letzten Jahren international Aufmerksamkeit erregt. In Deutschland wurde ein ähnliches Konzept für die Gesetzliche Rentenversicherung im Rahmen der "Riester Rente" diskutiert. Länder...

This paper investigates how politicians' patronage connections affect privatizations in China. The connections to top political leaders (i.e., Central Committee of the Communist Party of China) make local politicians engage more in rent-seeking by selling state-owned enterprises (SOEs) at...

A popular explanation for China's rapid economic growth in recent years has been the dramatic increase in the number of private domestic and foreign-owned firms and a decline in the state-owned sector. However, recent evidence suggest that China's state-owned enterprise (SOEs) are in fact...

The diversified business group (DBG) is a ubiquitous institution in developing economies. It is a formal inter-firm network that typically involves financial institutions, distributors and manufacturers. Groupwise diversification is viewed by some as a novel form of organizational innovation by...

To address challenges for the 21st century, the Chinese government initiated a series of higher education reforms to support the open-door policy of China. Part of the education reform involves an allocation of additional funding of US$ 20 billion to a group of 112 universities to strengthen...

The empirical literature comparing the innovation performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms in China often yields conflicting results. To shed new light on this debate, we construct an extensive dataset by linking the Annual Survey of Industrial Enterprises (ASIE) dataset...

In times of ever-rising health expenditures it is becoming more and more obvious that conventional models for funding health care are increasingly experiencing difficulties in meeting up this challenge. The concept of Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs) represents an innovative and so far rarely...

Das Konzept der Medical Savings Accounts als Instrument zur Finanzierung von Gesundheitssystemen hat in den letzten Jahren international Aufmerksamkeit erregt. In Deutschland wurde ein ähnliches Konzept für die Gesetzliche Rentenversicherung im Rahmen der Riester Rente diskutiert. Länder wie...

Performance contracts (PCs) - contracts signed between the government and state enterprise managers - have been used widely in developing countries. China's experience with such contracts was one of the largest experiments with contracting in the public sector, affecting hundreds of thousands of...

Around the turn of the century, China experienced perhaps the largest labor restructuring program in the world. This paper uses a new data set of Chinese industrial enterprises to examine what leads to downsizing, and tries to understand the effects of labor downsizing on firms' technical...