China began its gradual economic reform in the late 1970s; Russia initiated radical reform in the early 1990s. During the course of reform, China has enjoyed rapid growth while Russia has contracted. This paper argues that an important explanation for the striking performance difference in China...

Exploiting a unique data set containing transactions data from a panel of 769 Chinese state-owned enterprises between 1980 and 1989, this paper tests microeconomic implications of a pervasive form of corruption --official diversion of under-priced, in-plan goods to the market. Corruption has the...

In this paper, we use the Markov chain censoring technique to study infinite state Markov chains whose transition matrices possess block-repeating entries. We demonstrate that a number of important probabilistic measures are invariant under censoring. Informally speaking, these measures involve...

To date, China has maintained a variety of restrictions on its financial markets. In addition to imposing capital controls and regulating interest rates, the government controls both the set of firms that can sell equity on the domestic or foreign stock markets, and the amount they can sell....

Global migration is transforming not just urban populations, but the nature and economic roles of ethnic banks -- that is, banking institutions owned and operated by minorities. Academic research on ethnic banks has until now focused on the circumstances of African-American-owned banks. This...

The effectiveness of China's incremental industrial reform between 1980 and 1989 is investigated using a panel data set of 272 state enterprises. This paper applies a method that measures marginal products of factors and changes in total factor productivity (TFP) by comparing actual changes in...

We analyze ways in which heterogeneity in responsiveness to incentives ("drive") affects employees' incentives and firms' incentive systems in a career concerns model. On the one hand, because more driven agents work harder in response to existing incentives than less driven ones-and therefore...

I present a unified theoretical framework that attributes output collapse to price liberalization and decentralization of the formerly integrated monopolistic industrial structure in the former Soviet bloc, and output expansion in China to marginal marketization and intramarginal regulation. In...

Using a comprehensive country-level panel data set covering the period from 1990 to 2001, we investigate the impact of privatization and competition in the telecommunications sector around the world. Full privatization, which gave private owners control rights, contributed substantially to...