Interpersonal networks can sustain cooperation among businesspeople, but how do potential entrants demonstrate their credibility and reliability? Taking a mix of approaches, we examine drinking at China’s business banquets, which entrants commonly practice to signal trustworthiness and...

Which industry sectors bribe the government and, in turn, are exploited by the government the most in China? Or, as commonly satirized by the people, which sectors pay the most “tributes” (shanggong) to government officials? This article attempts to answer these questions by proposing a...

This paper studies the evolution of China's city size distribution, measured by non-agricultural population, from 1949 to 2008. We employ time series Gini coefficients, panel unit root test of Gibrat's law, and analysis of distribution dynamics, to check the robustness of our findings. We find...

How and why did property rights to collectively owned informal housing become secure at the local level in China? The security of such property rights, especially those subject to strong state interference, is significantly associated with the strategic interaction of local governments and local...

Redevelopment of Chinese urban villages may or may not happen and may or may not take a long time. To explain the variation, I identify two types of redevelopment approaches: autonomous and collaborative. In autonomous approaches, villagers operate independently and rely on norms and extralegal...