A key issue in political economy concerns the accountability that governance structures impose on public officials and how elections and representative democracy influences the allocation of public resources. In this paper we exploit a unique survey data set from nearly 2450 randomly selected...

Great changes have taken place in China’s agricultural and food markets in the past several decades. However, the impact of the transformation brought by modern supply chains on the welfare of farmers in China is unclear. This paper attempts to understand whether or not the recent changes in...

This study seeks to explain the differences in infrastructure quality across China’s villages. Using primary data on three main types of infrastructure projects in rural China, we find that a.) between-project within-village quality differences are small and project design has little...

Consumers have increasing demands for product standards. This has important implications for development. This paper develops a formal theory of the process of the introduction of high product standards in developing countries. The model endogenizes the introduction of high standards. Initial...

This paper examines how the nature of a common property resource affects the effectiveness of community-based management on resource conservation. We focus on groundwater management in rural China because there are different types of community-based groundwater management in different...

The overall goal of the paper is to understand the progress of the implementation of China’s New Cooperative Medical System (NCMS) program. In the paper we seek to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the program and understand its effect on rural residents using a panel of...