Authorship：Lead author   Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：Economic Modelling  

This paper develops a dynamic model of culture–politics–technology coevolution to explain the historical divergences between China and Europe. In China, rice cultivation and the monsoon climate generated high returns to large-scale infrastructure, encouraging collectivism and sustaining a steady trajectory of growing state centralization, which we call “cultural centralization”. In contrast, Europe's wheat-based agriculture and oceanic or Mediterranean climate produced lower returns to infrastructure, preserving individualism and political fragmentation. Yet individualism also stimulated innovation and productivity growth, creating a non-monotonic path of centralization: an initial phase of decentralization followed by renewed centralization driven by technological advances, a process of “technological centralization”. Overall, our analysis shows how environmental conditions, cultural norms, and infrastructure productivity together shaped the contrasting long-run paths of political centralization and technological progress in China and Europe.

DOI： 10.1016/j.econmod.2025.107315

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Authorship：Corresponding author   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：Elsevier BV  

The positive effect of nationalization on corporate social responsibility and environmental protection has been well acknowledged; however, its impact on firm profitability remains underexplored. The mixed-ownership reform in China, initiated in 2013, which encourages the nationalization of privately-owned enterprises (POEs), provides a natural experiment to examine how nationalization influences firm profitability. Using data from Chinese A-share listed firms between 2011 and 2023, we employ a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach for estimation, treating nationalized POEs as the treatment group. Our findings indicate that nationalized POEs experienced a decline in profitability following nationalization. This result remains robust across a series of robustness tests. We further identify two potential channels through which nationalization adversely affects profitability: increased overstaffing and a higher tax burden. Notably, the effect of nationalization exhibits heterogeneity—firms located in regions with lower levels of marketization and in non-eastern areas experience a more pronounced reduction in profitability. The policy implication of this study is that the nationalization process should consider not only social and environmental benefits but also economic performance.

DOI： 10.1016/j.irfa.2025.104744

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Authorship：Last author   Language：English   Publisher：Journal of Economics and Business  

Despite nearly twenty years of privatization, mixed-ownership reform has recently been China's mainstay of SOE reform. This raises the question of whether the financial performance of mixed-ownership firms (Mixed firms) is better than that of private-owned enterprises (POEs). Although Mixed firms suffer more from government intervention, unclear property rights, and interest conflicts between state and private shareholders, they can also benefit from the external resources controlled by the state. Therefore, the performance of Mixed firms is still unclear. Collecting data from the Chinese A-share listed market, we divide the firms into POEs, Mixed firms controlled by the state (MixedSOEs), and Mixed firms controlled by the private sectors (MixedPOEs). Measuring profitability using ROA and ROE, we find that POEs perform better than Mixed firms, and MixedPOEs have a higher profitability than MixedSOEs. Better corporate governance is the primary channel that can explain our results. We address the endogeneity challenge in several ways and get similar results. Overall, our analysis provides new evidence on the financial performance of mixed-ownership firms.

DOI： 10.1016/j.jeconbus.2025.106257

Web of Science

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Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：China Economic Review  

This paper aims to examine whether property rights protection can enhance firm innovation. To address the endogeneity problem and establish a causal relationship, we adopt the establishment of Intellectual Property Tribunals (IP Tribunals) in China as a natural experiment and employ the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach for estimation. By measuring firm innovation via patents and invention patent applications, we find that establishing IP Tribunals can significantly boost firm innovation. Furthermore, we investigate the heterogeneity of our baseline results and discover that privately-owned firms, smaller-sized firms, non-high-tech firms, and firms located in less marketized areas experience a larger improvement in innovation. This finding suggests that this institutional improvement provides greater protection to disadvantaged firms. Breaking regional protectionism and relaxing firm financing constraints are two possible mechanisms through which IP Tribunals can enhance firm innovation. Our results provide new evidence on how institutional change affects economic growth in China.

DOI： 10.1016/j.chieco.2024.102240

Web of Science

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