Annual Conference

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Trade, Growth and Development

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May 2025

Bottom-Up Institutional Change and Growth in China

Heng CHEN, Bingjing LI, Xiaodong ZHU
This paper investigates the role of bottom-up reforms in driving China’s economic growth. Leveraging granular documentation from county-level gazetteers, we identify local reform events from 1976 to 2005, capturing de facto policy innovations and their diffusion. Our findings show that bottom-up r...
Keywords: Bottom-up institutional change, TFP growth, policy diffusion, machine learning
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Annual Conference

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Trade, Growth and Development

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May 2025

Decoding China's Industrial Policies

Hanming FANG, Ming LI, Guangli LU
We decode China’s industrial policies from 2000 to 2022 by employing large language models (LLMs) to extract and analyze rich information from a comprehensive dataset of 3 million documents issued by central, provincial, and municipal governments. Through careful prompt engineering, multistage ext...
Keywords: Industrial Policy, Large Language Models, Policy Diffusion, Relative Comparative Advantage
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Annual Conference

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Trade, Growth and Development

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May 2025

Food Loss in Agricultural Value Chains

Daniel EHRLICH
Food loss is endemic in agricultural supply chains in developing countries. Reductions in food loss can be attained through two methods: decreasing the perishability of crops through investments in storage technologies or decreasing the length of time it takes farmers to find buyers for their harves...
Keywords: Trade, development, coordination frictions, agriculture, supply chains
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Annual Conference

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Trade, Growth and Development

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May 2025

Firm-to-Firm Referrals

Jing CAI, Wei LIN, Adam SZEIDL
We make randomized firm-to-firm referrals between 700 supplier and client firms in the industry producing the Chinese writing brush. Subsidized referrals lead to subsequent transactions and a partial crowding out of prior partners; information-only referrals have no effect. The referrals increase re...
Keywords: Supplier-client Matching, Business Stealing, Searching Frictions, Pessimistic Beliefs
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Annual Conference

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Trade, Growth and Development

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May 2025

Innovation Networks and R&D Allocation

Ernest LIU, Song MA
We study the cross-sector allocation of R&D resources in an innovation network, where one sector’s past innovations may benefit other sectors’ future innovations. We solve for the optimal R&D allocation and show that a planner valuing long-term growth should allocate more R&D toward ...
Keywords: Innovation, Networks, Resource Allocation
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