Lixin Colin Xu

Corruption, Income Distribution, and Growth

This paper uses an encompassing framework developed by Murphy et al. (1991, 1993) to study corruption and how it affects income distribution and growth. We find that (1) corruption affects income distribution in an inverted U-shaped way, (2) corruption alone also explains a large proportion of the Gini differential across developing and industrial countries, and (3) after correcting for measurement errors, corruption seems to retard economic growth. But the effect is far less pronounced than the one found in Mauro (1995). Moreover, corruption alone explains little of the continental growth differentials. In countries where the asset distribution is less equal, corruption is associated with a smaller increase in income inequality and a larger drop in growth rates.

Finance and Income Inequality: What Do the Data Tell Us?

Although there are distinct conjectures about the relationship between finance and income inequality, little empirical research compares their explanatory power. We examine the relationship between finance and income inequality for 83 countries between 1960 and 1995. Because financial development might be endogenous, we use instruments from the literature on law, finance, and growth to control for this. Our results suggest that, in the long run, inequality is less when financial development is greater, consistent with Galor and Zeira (1993) and Banerjee and Newman (1993). Although the results also suggest that inequality might increase as financial sector development increases at very low levels of financial sector development, as suggested by Greenwood and Jovanovic (1990), this result is not robust. We reject the hypothesis that financial development benefits only the rich. Our results thus suggest that in addition to improving growth, financial development also reduces inequality.

Who Gets Credit? The Behavior of Bureaucrats and State Banks in Allocating Credit to Chinese State-owned Enterprises

Using a sample of Chinese state-owned enterprises spanning 1980 to 1994, we investigate the factors that determine the sources of finance for firm-level fixed investment, including retained earnings, bank finance, and government transfers. Direct government transfers were not significantly associated with profitability throughout the period. In contrast, bank finance was positively linked to both profitability and some types of reform. Reforms that enabled managers to self-select, and thus expose themselves (and their employees) to greater risk, were positively associated with acquiring bank finance. The association between bank finance and profitability weakened in the 1990s as banks increasingly assumed bailout responsibility.

Eat, Drink, Firms, Government: An Investigation of Corruption from the Entertainment and Travel Costs of Chinese Firms

We propose entertainment and travel costs (ETC) expenditures as a measure of corruption in Chinese firms. These expenses are publicly reported in firms’ accounting books, and on average they amount to about 3 percent of a firm’s total value added. We find that ETC is a mix that includes grease money to obtain better government services, protection money to lower tax rates, managerial excesses, and normal business expenditures to build relational capital with suppliers and clients. Entertainment and travel costs overall have a significantly negative effect on firm productivity, but we also find that some components of ETC have substantial positive returns to firms.

Finance and income inequality : test of alternative theories

Although theoretical models make distinct predictions about the relationship between financial sector development and income inequality, little empirical research has been conducted to compare their relative explanatory power. The authors examine the relation between financial intermediary development and income inequality in a panel data set of 91 countries for the period 1960-95. Their results provide evidence that inequality decreases as economies develop their financial intermediaries, consistent with the theoretical models in Galor and Zeira (1993) and Banerjee and Newman (1993). Moreover, consistent with the insight of Kuznets, the relation between the Gini coefficient and financial intermediary development appears to depend on the sectoral structure of the economy: a larger modern sector is associated with a smaller drop in the Gini coefficient for the same level of financial intermediary development. But there is no evidence of an inverted-U-shaped relation between financial sector development and income inequality, as suggested by Greenwood and Jovanovic (1990). The results are robust to controlling for biases introduced by simultaneity.

Politician Control, Agency Problems and Ownership Reform: Evidence from China

Using data from a recent national survey on the ownership reform of state-owned enterprises in China, we study the effects of reducing politician control and agency problems on the financial performance of the reformed firms. Taking into account the endogenous nature of the reforms, we find that firm performance is positively affected by the lessening of politician control by increasing the firms flexibility in labor deployment and by the mitigation of agency costs through the introduction of more effective corporate governance mechanisms such as one-share one-vote and shareholding-based board structure composition. Ownership structure also affects performance: relative to shareholding by the state, foreign ownership has a positive effect on firm performance; individual (mostly employee) shareholding has a negative effect; whereas the effect of collective and legal person shareholding is indistinguishable from that of state shareholding. Somewhat surprisingly, operating autonomy (excluding labor deployment flexibility) has a negative effect on firm performance, suggesting serious agency problems in the reformed enterprises.

Ownership, Investment Climate and Firm Performance: Evidence from Chinese Firms

The importance of a countrys investment climate for economic growth has recently received much attention. In this paper we use a new survey of 1,500 Chinese enterprises in five cities to measure more precisely components of the investment climate and their effects on firm performance. Our firm-level analysis reveals that both ownership and investment climate measures matter for investment, productivity and growth. In particular, firm performance is positively correlated with foreign and domestic private ownership, light regulatory burdens, limited corruption, technological infrastructure and labour market flexibility. In contrast, gains from improving banking access and physical infrastructure are quite limited.

Explaining the Changes of Income Distribution in China

China has experienced one of the most remarkable increase in inequality over the last decade: the Gini coefficient increasing from 25.7 in 1984 to 37.8 in 1992. Using the recent developments in the theory of income distribution (Benerjee and Newman, 1993; Galor and Zeira, 1993) and a new panel data set about Chinese provincial-urban-level income inequality, this paper finds that inequality increased with the reduction of the share of state-owned enterprises in GDP, high inflation, growth, and (less significantly) the increasing exposure to foreign trade. We also find some evidence for the Directori¯s Law: income redistribution tends to shift resources from the rich and the poor to the middle class. We do not find schooling and urbanization to be a significant explanatory factor.

Control, Incentives and Competition: The Impact of Reform on Chinese State-owned Enterprises

Through the lens of the theory of the firm, I examine how a series of reforms affected the performance of Chinese state-owned enterprises with a panel dataset of more than 500 firms. The study finds that performance improved with various reforms such as increasing competition, appointing new managers, using firm-level pay sensitivity, raising marginal profit retention rates and allowing managers to determine wages and to make production decisions. Adopting performance contracts did not improve performance significantly. These results confirm the importance of competition, control rights, managerial and internal incentives, as emphasized by the theory of the firm.

Ownership, Competition, and Corruption: Bribe Takers versus Bribe Payers

Over the past few years, many studies have looked at the macroeconomic, cultural, and institutional determinants of corruption. This study complements these cross-country studies by focusing on microeconomic factors that affect bribes paid in a single sector of the economy. Using enterprise-level data on bribes paid to utilities in 21 transition economies in Easter Europe and Central Asia, the authors look at how characteristics of the firms paying bribes (such as ownership, profitability, and size) and characteristics of the utilities taking bribes (such as competition and utility capacity) affect the equilibrium level of corruption in the sector. On the side of bribe payers, enterprises that are more profitable, enterprises that have greater overdue payment to utilities, and de novo private firms pay higher bribes. On the side of bribe takers, bribes paid to utilities are higher in countries with greater constraints on utility capacity, lower levels of competition in the utility sector, and where utilities are state-owned. Bribes in the utility sector are also correlated with many of the macroeconomic and political factors that previous studies have found to affect the overall level of corruption.