Recruiting and retaining leaders and public servants at the grass-roots level in developing countries creates a potential tension between providing sufficient returns to attract talent and limiting the scope for excessive rent-seeking behavior. In China, researchers have frequently argued that...

Recent anecdotal reports suggest that dropout rates may be higher and actually increasing over time in poor rural areas. There are many reasons not to be surprised that there is a dropout problem, given the fact that China has a high level of poverty among the rural population, a highly...

This paper, using unique survey data from the banking industry in rural China, investigates the effect of incentive contracts on performance. In the context of China`s economic transition, we find that the incentive contracts have a positive effect on the bank manager`s performance in deposit...

In the 1990s, poor, rural youth in China had limited access to college. After mass college expansion started in 1998, however, it was unclear whether poor, rural youth would gain greater access. The goal of our paper is to examine the gap in college and elite college access between poor, rural...