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It is well known in economics, law, and sociology that reputation costs in a closed network give insiders a feeling of being protected from bad behavior in their relations with one another. A person accustomed to doing business within a closed network is, therefore, likely to feel at unusual risk when asked to cooperate beyond the network because of absent reputation-cost security. It follows that business leaders in more closed networks should be less likely to cooperate beyond their network (Hypothesis 1 ). Success reinforces the status quo. Business leaders successful with a closed network associate their success with the safety of their network, so they should be even less likely to cooperate with a stranger (Hypothesis 2 ). We combine network data from a heterogeneous area probability survey of Chinese CEOs with a behavioral measure of cooperation to show strong empirical support for the two hypotheses. CEOs in more closed networks are less likely to cooperate beyond their network, especially those running successful businesses: successful CEOs in closed networks are particularly likely to defect against people beyond their network. The work contributes to a growing literature linking network structure with behavior: here, the closure that facilitates trust and cooperation within a network simultaneously erodes the probability of cooperation beyond the network, thereby reinforcing a social boundary around the network. Taking our results as a baseline, we close sketching new research on personality, homophily, network dynamics, and variation in the meaning of “beyond the network.”

Almost two decades ago, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 19(2/3): 251–267 Peng (2002) called attention to the promise of institution-based strategy research. The puzzle was to explain differences in strategies around the globe. Building on the work accomplished so far, I ask: Can institution-based strategy succeed when embedded in inappropriate social networks? Institutions and networks are usually studied as separate phenomena, yet each also defines the capabilities of the other. Institutions shape social network contacts and structures because institutions define opportunities for affiliation and the relative value of distinct contacts and network structures. At the same time, social networks shape institutions and organizations’ capabilities for institutional innovation. Thus, the social network in which a manager or organization is embedded can either amplify or counteract success in implementing institution-based strategy. After I review the co-constitutional nature of institutions and networks and discuss a number of sample studies using China as a productive research site, I sketch questions that need to be answered to more tightly integrate network behavior into institutional strategy research, and discuss four emerging areas of research into how network-strategy fit affects performance: (1) network fit to adaptive strategy, (2) network fit to change strategy, (3) institutional dynamics and network-strategy fit, and (4) institutional distance and network-strategy fit.

This paper examines the link between the social networks surrounding business leaders and temporal myopia in strategic planning. Specifically, we hypothesize that processes characteristic of being ...

What does it mean for a private enterprise in China to be embedded in a family? Our purpose here is twofold: (1) use social network analysis to describe what it means for a firm to be embedded in a family, (2) reveal from the application a new kind of firm, not family, yet akin to family. Armed with data on a large probability sample of private enterprises — a third of which meet ownership and employment criteria of being family businesses — we uncover a category of “hybrid family firms” that look modern in the style of firms that exclude family, but operate socially in ways similar to family firms. Our conclusion from summary statistics on the sample is that there are no differences in average performance level or network advantage for the three categories of businesses: family firms, hybrid family firms, and family-excluded firms. The fact that CEOs of family firms and hybrid family firms more often turn to family as key business contacts is a fact about network composition that raises no question about network mechanisms. Whether the CEO turns to more or fewer family contacts, government help is more likely with stronger political connections, and business success and survival are more likely with a large, open network. That said, the look-modern, act-traditional hybrid family firms stand alone in prospering with a CEO embedded in a closed business network. Recognition of hybrid family firms adds to the literature’s illustrations of social network analysis used to distinguish types of businesses and business people, and extends the population of organizations within which governance and strategy are likely to be better understood when viewed through a family logic.

We study whether CEOs of private firms differ from other people with regard to their strategic decisions and beliefs about others’ strategy choices. Such differences are interesting since CEOs make decisions that are economically more relevant, because they affect not only their own utility or the well-being of household members, but the utility of many stakeholders inside and outside of the organization. They also play a central role in shaping values and norms in society. We expect differences between both groups, because CEOs are more experienced with strategic decision making than comparable people in other professional roles. Yet, due to the difficulties in recruiting this high-profile group for academic research, few studies have explored how CEOs make incentivized decisions in strategic games under strict controls and how their choices in such games differ from those made by others. Our study combines a stratified random sample of 200 CEOs of medium-sized firms with a carefully selected control group of 200 comparable people. All subjects participated in three incentivized games—Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chicken, Battle-of-the-Sexes. Beliefs were elicited for each game. We report substantial and robust differences in both behavior and beliefs between the CEOs and the control group. The most striking results are that CEOs do not best respond to beliefs; they cooperate more, play less hawkish and thereby earn much more than the control group.

China has since the 1980s emerged as one of the world’s largest economies and the main emitter of carbon dioxide. Any attempt to combat global warming at the global level is therefore dependent on the future trajectory of Chinese emissions. In this paper we consider the effect of firm ownership on provincial emissions. The hypothesis is that private firms are economically more efficient than non-private firms. Our results support this hypothesis and offer two policy implications to reduce emission growth: First, industrial policies need to focus on productivity enhancing reforms of the non-private sector. Second, continuing structural reforms lifting remaining barriers of private firm production will be crucial to contain or even reduce national emissions. (Less)

It is well known in economics, law, and sociology that reputation costs in a closed network give insiders a feeling of being protected from bad behavior in their relations with one another. A person accustomed to doing business within a closed network is therefore likely to feel at unusual risk when asked to cooperate beyond the network because of absent reputation-cost security. It follows that business leaders in more closed networks should be less likely to cooperate beyond their network (H1). Success reinforces the status quo. Business leaders successful with a closed network associate their success with the safety of their network, so they should be even less likely to cooperate with a stranger (H2). We combine network data from a heterogeneous area probability survey of Chinese CEOs, with a behavioral measure of cooperation, to show strong empirical support for the two hypotheses. CEOs in more closed networks are less likely to cooperate beyond their network, especially those running successful businesses: Successful CEOs in closed networks are particularly likely to defect against people beyond their network. The work contributes to a growing literature linking network structure with behavior: here, the closure that facilitates trust and cooperation within a network simultaneously erodes the probability of cooperation beyond the network, thereby reinforcing a social boundary around the network. Taking our results as a baseline, we close sketching new research on personality, homophily, network dynamics, and variation in the meaning of “beyond the network.”

The chapter focuses on the tradition of new institutionalism, arguing that governance or institution building is a major factor in economic life and a relevant aspect of economic growth. In contrast to most of the classical approaches, emphasizing the state as a central arbiter of institutional change, it is shown that in reality, bottom-up and second-best solutions can play a central and highly effective role in institution building. Both developments rely on private actors rather than state actors. When and how these efforts of institution building succeed, however, depends on social context: social networks and local culture.

Political connection in China is often tested for correlation with business success and government support under a suspicion that connected entrepreneurs enjoy special favors and protection. Research evidence is mixed. In revisiting the debate on political capital in China, we apply a socially embedded perspective on political connection. To this end we introduce two methodological innovations: (a) We develop a broader measure of political connectedness that covers the continuum from political connection to disconnection. (b) We integrate data on political connection with social network data. Specifically, we explore how the social structure around the individual entrepreneur affects performance above and beyond the often tested association between political ties and performance. We draw two conclusions: (1) The success association with political connection is discontinuous. Advantage is less for entrepreneurs weakly connected politically, but significant additional disadvantage arises for the politically disconnected. (2) The additional is that entrepreneurs disconnected from government show no benefit from having an advantaged business network. The politically connected with an advantaged business network show more prosperous business, higher returns on assets, and more likely survival over time. The politically disconnected show none of these benefits. We caution the entrepreneur who plans to ignore the government.

What does it mean for a private enterprise in China to be embedded in a family? Our purpose here is twofold: (1) use social network analysis to describe what it means for a firm to be embedded in a family, (2) reveal from the application a new kind of firm, not family, yet akin to family. Armed with data on a large probability sample of private enterprises — a third of which meet ownership and employment criteria of being family businesses — we uncover a category of “hybrid family firms” that look modern in the style of firms that exclude family, but operate socially in ways similar to family firms. Our conclusion from summary statistics on the sample is that there are no differences in average performance level or network advantage for the three categories of businesses: family firms, hybrid family firms, and family-excluded firms. The fact that CEOs of family firms and hybrid family firms more often turn to family as key business contacts is a fact about network composition that raises no question about network mechanisms. Whether the CEO turns to more or fewer family contacts, government help is more likely with stronger political connections, and business success and survival are more likely with a large, open network. That said, the look-modern, act-traditional hybrid family firms stand alone in prospering with a CEO embedded in a closed business network. Recognition of hybrid family firms adds to the literature’s illustrations of social network analysis used to distinguish types of businesses and business people, and extends the population of organizations within which governance and strategy are likely to be better understood when viewed through a family logic.

We hypothesize that informal bank networks influence corporate credit access in China. Our sample comprises a panel of 515 corporations listed on China's stock exchanges with a total of 1,052 firm-year observations, holding a total of 7,009 major bank loans from 183 distinct banks between 2007 and 2012. Results support the hypothesis that closure in bank networks facilitates credit access. We further show that the positive closure-performance association offers fewer advantages if financial markets and the legal infrastructure are relatively well developed. Our findings contribute to an emergent literature examining how informal networks can productively substitute weak formal institutions, and how the interplay between informal networks and network embeddedness shapes individual and corporate strategies.

This paper examines the link between the social networks surrounding business leaders and temporal myopia in strategic planning. Specifically, we hypothesize that processes characteristic of being embedded in a closed network are associated with a lack of foresight and a tendency to neglect long-run strategic planning. Using a probability sample of 700 CEOs in China, we show that network closure is associated with temporal myopia, which is evidenced in various measures of business planning. We show that managers embedded in closed networks are less experienced in long-run planning, and are also less successful in implementing long-run business plans. Our contribution to the literature is twofold: we add a network perspective to the literature on temporal myopia in strategic management; and more significantly, by grounding temporal myopia in the network surrounding a person, we separate temporal myopia from the person. Myopia emerges from the social situations we create, or in which we find ourselves.

Are entrepreneurial cultures stable over time? In this paper, we use historical measures of the outgrowth of entrepreneurial culture in China and test whether these correlate with entrepreneurial activities today. We employ provincial panel data from China documenting the regional distribution of entrepreneurial activities during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) and the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) and private firm activities in post-reform China (1992–2012). Our study finds a significant association between the regional distribution of historical and current measures of entrepreneurship, supporting (1) the long-term stability of underlying regional cultural differences; and (2) the adaptability of entrepreneurial activities to changing institutional arrangements and relative payoff structures. These results are robust to numerous alternative explanations, including geography, agglomeration advantages, education, and technology. Our findings suggest that government efforts to encourage new business ventures—if they are to have more than short-term effects—will need to take into account local cultural norms.

In China, the strategic use of personal relationships is pervasive in transactions with government authorities as well as in interfirm relations. Explanations as to when and why firms rely on guanx...

There is broad scholarly agreement that history and founding conditions matter in the design of institutions and organizations (Marquis, 2003). Yet study of institutional and organizational develop...

Sanctions against bad behavior vary greatly. Some wrongdoers are regarded as no longer trustworthy; others face only modest consequences. This study investigates how this difference can be explaine...

The strong ties known in China as guanxi can be distinguished by a high level of trust relatively independent of the surrounding social structure. Using network data from a stratified probability sample of 700 entrepreneurs citing 4664 contacts, we study guanxi relative to other relations to learn how much individual differences such as well-being, business differences, political participation and demographic factors matter for the guanxi distinction. Two findings stand out: First, the connection between trust and social network is robust to most differences between individuals, especially business and political differences. Trust variance is 60% network context, and 10% individual differences. Trust increases within a relationship as network closure increases around the relationship, but some relationships mature into guanxi ties within which trust is high and relatively independent of the surrounding social structure. Second, when individual differences matter, they concern social isolation. Guanxi ties are more distinct in the networks around entrepreneurs with small, marginal families, and around those with small, closed networks. Both categories of entrepreneurs are likely to experience difficulties with respect to resource access and doing business with people beyond their network, which may explain why longstanding guanxi ties linked to important events are particularly distinct for these entrepreneurs.

Where does generalized trust—that is, the inclination to place trust in strangers—come from? Our claim is that in economic action, sources of generalized trust may not differ much from the sources of personalized trust. Contrary to a common assumption of a sharp distinction between personalized and generalized trust, we assert a likely spillover effect from relational exchange to a person’s expectations in interacting with an anonymous other. Our research integrates behavioral measures elicited by a novel incentivized trust game with survey data using a random sample of 540 entrepreneurs of private industrial firms in the Yangzi delta region of China. We show that entrepreneurs with more experience in relational exchange display greater trust in strangers. Likewise, we find robust evidence of a positive association between beliefs in the effectiveness of community business norms and generalized trust.

The rapid rise of an innovative private manufacturing economy in China challenges standard economic explanations of growth, which typically assume the existence of well-defined formal institutions such as property rights and company laws safeguarding investor and creditor interests. We highlight the social structure of cooperation that enables innovative activity in private manufacturing firms when formal property rights protection remains weak. We show how network effects linked to inter-firm cooperation in industrial clusters allowed private entrepreneurs to quickly develop reliable business norms to reduce the inherent risk of malfeasance and contract breach in formal and informal collaborative efforts. Survey data from a sample of 700 manufacturing firms located in China’s Yangzi Delta region confirms that both formal and informal types of inter-firm collaboration are effective, though in different areas of innovative activity.

Staphylococcus is a prevalent and versatile bacterium found in many different settings, from numerous animal hosts in the environment to healthcare facilities in the community. It has become very successful in establishing itself as a commensal in various humans and animals. Concern over this bacterium has increased due to the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes between strains. This study specifically investigated the prevalence of Staph from the nasal passages of white tailed deer, Odocoileus virginianus, in Western New York. This source of bacteria is unique in that it should not be under direct influence of antibiotic use. DNA was isolated from strains of Staph from the deer, and PCR was performed to amplify a region of the 16s rRNA gene and a number of genetic markers used for multi-locus sequence typing (MLST) for DNA sequence analysis. Tentative phylogenetic relationships of these bacterial strains were made to previously characterized type strains of Staphylococcus. The use of MLST and 16s rRNA gene sequence deserve analysis with respect to their broad applicability beyond the strains typically found associated with humans and agriculture.

We trace the social networks around Chinese entrepreneurs back to their firm's founding to learn about the role early events play in the later success of a business. We use name generator questions paired with career history questions to identify ‘event contacts’ missed by the usual focus on current business. We draw four conclusions from interviews with a large, stratified random sample of entrepreneurs: (1) Relations with event contacts stand out forguanxiqualities of high trust relatively independent of the surrounding network structure, and are critical to distinguishing more successful entrepreneurs from the less successful. (2) The substance of a significant event matters less than the fact that the entrepreneur deems it significant. (3) When family is turned to for support it is most likely at founding, but family is not the usual source of support at founding. Rather, entrepreneurs turn to people they have known for many years, typically people beyond the entrepreneur's family. (4) The transition from founding to first significant event stands out as distinctly consequential for later success. Entrepreneurs who turn for help on their first significant event to a person separate from, but especially close to, the founding contact are more successful in their business development. That early move is not visible in the later network around the entrepreneur.

Temporal discounting is a well-known phenomenon: a reward received today is felt to be worth more than a comparable reward to be received years in the future. We also know that some people are more...

China’s unbalanced growth strategy has seemingly fostered growing inter-regional growth disparities and there is little evidence of wealth trickling down from richer provinces to poorer provinces. Standard convergence tests, however, may be ill specified to detect underlying long-term growth trends in small samples due to the pronounced and frequent inter-regional short-term fluctuations. Our paper suggests a novel approach to distinguish between these long-term growth trends and short-term fluctuations. Based on provincial data from 1978 to 2009, our results indicate that China’s provinces only diverge over the shortterm. Over the long term, provinces cluster into two converging growth clubs.

This study examines the determinants of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) turnover in Chinese state-owned firms. Based on a sample of 1 555 turnover cases among listed firms in China during the period 19992003, we obtain three main results. First, CEO turnover is negatively related to the sales performance but not the profitability of the core business. Second, the negative relationship between CEO turnover and sales is stronger for firms with excessive employment and higher organizational slack. Third, there is a significant post-turnover increase in sales but a decline in profitability of the core business. Overall, our evidence suggests that state shareholders put a greater emphasis on sales generation than on profitability when they monitor their CEOs. (Less)

In a recent paper Pedroni and Yao (2006) present strong evidence suggesting that Chinese provincial per-capita output is diverging, a result that goes against the Chinese government’s goal of a balanced wealth-creation across provinces. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the reasoning behind this finding. Our main result is that the divergence does exist, even when new data and more advanced methods of analysis are used. We also find that it has both an idiosyncratic and a common component. Hence, the increased per-capita output inequalities observed at the provincial level is due to both province-specific disparities and to disparities between groups of provinces.

This research applies a transaction-focused institutional analysis to compare the value of political capital in different institutional domains of China's market economy. Our results show that the value of political capital is associated with institutional domains of the economy in which agents can use political connections to secure advantages. Political capital is most fungible in institutional domains where government restricts economic activity. In this sense, the value of political connections in China does not differ fundamentally from patterns observable in established market economies. We interpret this as evidence suggesting China may have experienced a tipping point in its transition to a market economy around the turn of the new century.

State-centered theory asserts that political institutions and credible commitment by political elite to formal rules securing property rights provides the necessary and sufficient conditions for economic growth to take place. In this approach, the evolution of institutions favorable to economic performance is a top-down process led by politicians who control the state. Hence, in less developed and poor countries, the counterfactual is that if formal institutions secure property rights and check predatory action by the political elite, then sustained economic growth would follow. The limitation of state-centered theory stems from the problem that behavioral prescriptions - formal rules and regulations - that reflect what politicians prefer can be ignored. In contrast, we lay out the bottomup construction of economic institutions that gave rise to capitalist economic development in China. Entrepreneurship in the economically developed regions of the coastal provinces was not fueled by exogenous institutional changes. When the first entrepreneurs decided to decouple from the traditional socialist production system, the government had neither initiated financial reforms inviting a broader societal participation, nor had it provided property rights protection or transparent rules specifying company registration and liabilities. Instead, it was the development and use of innovative informal arrangements within close-knit groups of like-minded actors that provided the necessary funding and reliable business norms. This allowed the first wave of entrepreneurs to survive outside of the state-owned manufacturing system. This bottom-up process resembles earlier accounts of the rise of capitalism in the West. Secondo la teoria stato-centrica, sono le istituzioni politiche e un impegno credibile dell’elite politica per regole formali che garantiscano i diritti di proprieta a costituire la condizione necessaria e sufficiente perche si produca crescita economica. Secondo tale approccio lo sviluppo di istituzioni che favoriscano il successo economico e un processo che si sviluppa dall’alto, guidato dai politici che controllano lo stato. Pertanto, nei paesi meno sviluppati e poveri basterebbe ci fossero istituzioni formali a garantire i diritti di proprieta e tener sotto controllo le pratiche predatorie dell’elite politica per ottenere crescita economica sostenuta. Il limite della teoria stato-centrica sta nel fatto che le prescrizioni operative - regole e regolamenti formali - che riflettono le preferenze dei politici possono essere ignorate. Al contrario, noi descriviamo come si siano costruite dal basso le istituzioni economiche che hanno dato vita allo sviluppo capitalistico in Cina. Lo sviluppo dell’impresa privata nelle regioni economicamente sviluppate delle province costiere non e stato alimentato da cambiamenti istituzionali esogeni. Quando i primi imprenditori decisero di staccarsi dal tradizionale sistema di produzione socialista, il governo non aveva ne avviato riforme finanziarie volte a favorire una piu ampia partecipazione societaria, ne fornito protezione dei diritti di proprieta o regole trasparenti sulla registrazione e la responsabilita delle imprese. Invece, fu lo sviluppo e l’utilizzo di intese informali innovative tra gruppi coesi di attori con orientamenti comuni a far emergere i finanziamenti necessari e norme commerciali affidabili. Questo permise alla prima ondata di imprenditori di sopravvivere al di fuori del sistema manifatturiero dello stato. Questo processo di mutamento dal basso somiglia a precedenti descrizioni della nascita del capitalismo in Occidente.

In sociology, new institutionalists led the revival in interest in institutions in organizational theory and economic sociology by shifting the focus of causal reasoning from agent-centric studies of economic and organizational actors to the relationship connecting the firm with its institutional environment. We suggest a multilevel causal model incorporating the connection between the subinstitutional domain of social action and concrete social relationships, and the meso- and macroinstitutional environment of customs, conventions, law, organizations, ideology, and the state as the key elements explaining the rise and demise of institutions. In this model, norms bridge the microworld of individual actors and social groups, and the broader institutional environment.

We argue that leadership promotion in China's political elite relies on homophily for signals of trustworthiness and future cooperative behavior more than on economic performance. We first point to the limitation of the economic performance argument from within the framework of China's specific M-form state structure, and then we proffer a sociological explanation for why higher-level elites in China rely on homophilous associations in recruiting middle-level elites to the top positions of state. Using a unique dataset covering China's provincial leaders from 1979 to 2011, we develop a homophily index focusing on joint origin, joint education and joint work experience. We trace personal similarities in these respects between provincial leaders and members of China's supreme decision-making body, the Politbureau's Standing Committee. We then provide robust evidence confirming the persisting impact of homophilous associations on promotion patterns in post-reform China.

This study examines the determinants behind the restructuring of China's SOEs in the late 1990s. We have reached two major findings. First, we find that the degree of labor retrenchment is negatively related to enterprise performance, suggesting that poor performance is a major force driving labor restructuring. Second, we offer evidence that decisions on labor retrenchment in traditional SOEs are related to the local government's fiscal position and to local reemployment conditions for laid-off workers. In contrast, labor decisions in corporatized SOEs are not related to these two variables. Our results suggest that corporatized SOEs with partial private ownership may enjoy higher autonomy in labor decisions. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In this study we use a dataset that provides information on Chinese Communist Party grassroots organizations’ political control over decision-making in China's listed firms. Specifically, we examine how different types of shareholders affect (1) the party's level of decision-making power and (2) the implications of party control for firm performance. We obtain two major results. First, we find that the proportion of shares held by domestic individual shareholders is negatively related to the party's level of decision-making power. Second, we find that the existence of large institutional investors is associated with a reduced negative performance effect of party control. Our results suggest that both the exit and the voice channels may offer mechanisms for depoliticizing China's listed firms and improving their performance. This study both addresses an important corporate governance issue relevant to China's listed firms and offers interesting information in terms of comparative studies of corporate governance and reform strategies in transitional economies.

The key objective of this paper is to highlight the interconnectedness between China's political and economic system and its weak enforcement of accounting and auditing standards. The institutional analysis shows that the prevailing political and economic priorities constituting China's “socialist market economy” create a framework, that basically relies on state-led enforcement with weak supplementary private safeguard mechanisms. The resulting policy-mix is characterized by a mismatch of incentives and available devices to effectively enhance enforcement. While the state bureaucracy has little incentive to effectively fight financial misreporting because of both blurred policy–economy boundaries and the coexistence of multiple and even non-economic goals, shareholders and creditors do not have sufficient and effective private safeguard mechanisms at hand. Findings lead to the conclusion that China's recent harmonization move of accounting and auditing standards urgently needs to be backed up by stronger efforts to create effective enforcement mechanisms. Sound reforms would have to center on a rigorous upgrading and restructuring of the responsible bodies supervising auditing quality and financial disclosure. Parallel to these measures, the increasing integration into the global economy may provide incentives and competitive pressure to comply with globally accepted standards.

Structural changes of the elite have been a particular focus of sociological and economic research and debate since the outset of reforms in the post-communist transition countries. While most studies on elite changes focus on the relative income position as the indicator for the changing position of the old elite, we concentrate on the strength and pattern of decision-making power of China's old elite in newly emerging economic entities, such as listed companies. In line with the power persistence thesis, our analysis shows that the local party committees still succeed at keeping their fingers in the decision-making process even after two decades of economic transition, due to diverse lock-in effects between the party and various areas of the institutional environment. We hypothesize that the decision-making power of the local party committees is weakened by the emergence of market and private power during the economic reform and test our hypothesis by employing a survey conducted by the Shanghai Stock Exchange. This study supplements and broadens empirical evidence on the market-transition model and emphasizes the particular importance of a major private shareholder as the central constraint on the persistence of old elite in enterprise decision making.

That social capital matters in corporate lending relations is uncontested. While the literature has largely focused on the quality of dyadic firm-bank ties in explaining corporate credit access, we...

Contains fulltext : 158903.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) China’s banking sector is dominated by four distinct organizational forms: policy banks (PBs), state-owned commercial banks (SOCBs), joint stock commercial banks (JSCBs), and rural credit cooperatives (RCCs). Economic analyses have especially focused on the development of bank efficiency and profitability over time. The equally important question, which of China’s banking institutions promote economic growth, has not been explored using macroeconomic data. Our study uses a novel data set covering the period 1997–2008 and employs Granger causality tests to estimate the finance–growth nexus of each of these bank types. Our results show that SOCBs and RCCs do not Granger-cause GDP growth and that SOCBs even have a negative effect on manufacturing growth. By contrast, PBs and JSCBs promote economic growth. 12 januari 2016

The dual-track approach is characteristic of evolutionary reforms in China. The most important aspect of this dualism has been the reform of the ownership structure. On the one track, new, basically market-oriented institutions emerged in a parallel economy comprising non-state enterprises. On the other track, stateowned enterprises were retained and reforms were restricted to conservative policy changes bringing minor productivity-enhancing measures. In order to highlight the performance of the two tracks, a widely neglected indicator is employed to check the performance of enterprises: namely a structural comparison of the resource reallocation processes of both tracks over time. It becomes clear that structural adjustment was basically generated by the new track. In addition, it is shown that the increasing competition from the new track will not accelerate structural adjustment of the old track as long as institutional reforms of SOEs are not significantly extended.

The USA regularly stresses that it is in favour of China's admission to the World Trade Organization, given the country's growing network of international relations and its increasing political and economic significance. China's own political leadership has been driving home its demand to be readmitted to the GATT (WTO) since as long ago as July 1986. Yet in spite of the apparent concurrence of interests the two countries convey to the outside world, China's entry negotiations have not yielded any evidence of a positive outcome.

This study reports findings from the first large-scale experiment investigating whether entrepreneurs differ from other people in their willingness to expose themselves to various forms of uncertainty. A stratified random sample of 700 chief executive officers from the Yangzi delta region in China is compared to 200 control group members. Our findings suggest that in economic decisions, entrepreneurs are more willing to accept strategic uncertainty related to multilateral competition and trust. However, entrepreneurs do not differ from ordinary people when it comes to nonstrategic forms of uncertainty, such as risk and ambiguity. This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics.

Where does generalized trust, that is, the inclination to place trust in strangers, come from? Our claim is that in economic action sources of generalized trust may not differ much from the sources...

This study examines the long-term stability of regional variation in entrepreneurial culture and its impact on the re-emergence of private entrepreneurial activity in post-reform China. Our quantit...