This study addresses the apparent puzzle that China achieved spectacular economic performance despite weak institutions. Using a World Bank survey of 1,566 manufacturing enterprises in 18 Chinese cities, we investigated whether property rights protection mattered for enterprise performance. We...

It has been taken for granted in the literature on the determinants of vertical integration that the effectiveness of contract enforcement is guaranteed, which is far from true even in some developed countries. In this paper, using a World Bank data set of manufacturing firms in China, we...

Agglomeration brings costs (e.g., intensified local competition) as well as benefits (e.g., knowledge spillover). It is important to examine the net impact of agglomeration to understand the geographic distribution of economic activities. In this study, we use firm markup (defined as the ratio...

This paper studies the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on industrial agglomeration.Using the differential effects of FDI deregulation in 2002 in China on different industries, we find that FDI actually affects industrial agglomeration negatively. This result is somewhat...