This article argues that the importance of legal systems on private investment in China depends not on how credibly the rule of law is established, but how effective the government is at maintaining law and order. The legal development in China has contributed to the country's success in...

In this article we depart from the classic model of foreign direct investment (FDI) determinants and examine the effect of socio-historical factors on FDI. We argue that past foreign aid projects confer social capital that constitutes specific resources available to investors in the present,...

We propose a quantitative theory of wealth creation and distribution during China's transitional growth from the early 1990s, when barriers to setting up private businesses, trading housing, and migrating from rural to urban areas are struck down. In response to the changing economic...

Tobin's Q exceeds one, even without any adjustment costs, for a firm that earns rents as a result of monopoly power or of decreasing returns to scale in production. Even when there are no adjustment costs and marginal Q is always equal to one, Tobin's Q is informative about the firm's growth...

Empirical evidence suggests that capital separation is an important phenomenon over and beyond depreciation and that reallocation is a costly and time-consuming process. In addition, both separation and reallocation rates display substantial variation over the business cycle. We build a dynamic...

This paper investigates the role of financial market frictions on investment and the price of financial asset. We show that standard models with financial market imperfections can be summarized with a simple financing cost function, equal to the product of the financing premium and the amount of...

Personal taxation can be an important determinant of corporate investment and financing decisions if the marginal investor is taxed. I develop a dynamic capital budgeting model under realization-based capital gains taxation that highlights distinct cross-sectional and time-series implications....