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Is the Wife A Risk Mitigator? Evidence from Family Firms in China

Yue Pan, Jinli Xiao, Vincent W. Yao, Jian Zhang, Jun 06, 2018

Firm-level decisions are largely made by corporate executives whose preferences and attitudes can be shaped by historical traits and what is happening inside their households. We investigate how the involvement of a founder’s wife through marital ownership influences the family firm’s level of risk-taking and explore the underlying mechanisms.

Does China’s Place-Based Land Policy Lead to Spatial Misallocation?

Min Fang, Libin Han, Zibin Huang, Ming Lu, Li Zhang, Nov 17, 2021

After 2003, the Chinese central government implemented an inland-favoring land supply policy that distributed more construction land quotas to underdeveloped non-eastern regions. We investigate the effect of the policy and find that it drastically increased land and housing prices in more-developed eastern regions, which consequently created substantial spatial misallocation of land and labor. The policy seems to reduce regional output gaps; however, it hurt...

The Unintended Impacts of Agricultural Fires: Human Capital in China

Joshua Graff Zivin, Tong Liu, Yingquan Song, Qu Tang, Peng Zhang, Dec 25, 2019

The practice of burning agricultural waste is ubiquitous around the world, yet the external human capital costs from those fires have been underexplored. Using data from the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) and agricultural fires detected by high-resolution satellites in China from 2005 to 2011, this paper investigates the impacts of fires on cognitive performance...

State Versus Market: China’s Infrastructure Investment

Shuoge Qian, Hong Ru, Wei Xiong, Mar 13, 2024

In 2005, the Chinese government launched the landmark “36 Clauses” reform, marking a critical step toward forging a more favorable market environment.

Judicial Independence, Local Protectionism, and Economic Integration in China

Ernest Liu, Yi Lu, Wenwei Peng, Shaoda Wang, Nov 23, 2022

Exploiting the staggered rollout, since 2014, of judicial independence reform that removed local governments’ control over local courts’ financial and personnel decisions in China, we show that judicial independence can reduce local protectionism and foster cross-regional economic integration.