This paper employs a new empirical approach to estimate the impact of subsidies on growth and productivity. Our key innovation is to use local political leader geographic rotation as a source of exogenous variation. By using Chinese Industrial Census data from 1999 to 2013, we find that more...

Using a sample of one million land transactions in China from 2006 to 2013, I find that the average price of publicly auctioned residential land is nine times higher than the price of adjacent local government-designated industrial land. An industry in a city receiving greater industrial land...