This paper is based on an ongoing joint work with David Sahn and Xiaobo Zhang.

The objective of this paper is to examine whether noncognitive skills explain differences in employment status and hourly wages even after controlling for age, experience, schooling and cognitive skills. Of particular interest is to examine the relative magnitudes of the impacts of the cognitive...

Households in developing countries take various actions to smooth income or consumption as a means of managing or responding to risk. One of the principal means of smoothing income is through the diversification of income sources, including non-farm employment and rural-urban migration. An...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/14/11.

Informal credit markets are very active in many developing countries including China. Informal financial associations have become a major channel of borrowing. Using data from the 2006 Rural Household Survey, this paper investigates farmers’ borrowings from both formal and informal sources...

: In recent years Chinese rapeseed production has undergone significant changes. In order to explain this evolution, this article focuses on analyzing gross margin ratios and labour cost for rapeseed and wheat which is found to be the major competing crop from a grower’s perspective. An...

Technology and innovation play an increasingly important role in the economic development of both developed and developing countries. We investigate how policy and market factors influence firms’ (or other potential innovators’) decisions on innovation or imitation by developing a conceptual...

This Viewpoint article, based on a lecture to the 2012 Oxford Farming Conference, examines the rise in economic power of the so-called ‘emerging markets’ (EM) and its implications for agricultural markets in the so-called ‘developed world’. In particular, the favourable...

I study the determinants of ISO 14001 certification in a sample of manufacturing firms in China as well as the effect of ISO 14001 certification on firm environmental performance. Results indicate that ISO 14001 plays an important role in signaling the firm's environmental technology to...