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Dive into the research topics where Loren Brandt is active.

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Featured researches published by Loren Brandt.


Journal of Comparative Economics | 2003

Bank Discrimination in Transition Economies: Ideology, Information or Incentives?

Loren Brandt; Hongbin Li

We study bank discrimination against private firms in transition countries. Theoretically, we show that banks may discriminate for non-profit reasons, but this discrimination diminishes with a banks incentives and human capital. Employing matching bank-firm data from China, we empirically examine the extent, sources and consequences of discrimination. Our unique survey design allows us to disentangle sample truncation, omitted variable bias, and endogeneity issues. Our empirical findings confirm the theoretical predictions. We also find that as a result of discrimination, private firms resort to more expensive trade credits.


Economic Development and Cultural Change | 2005

The Evolution of Income Inequality in Rural China

Dwayne Benjamin; Loren Brandt; John Giles

In this article we analyze trends in income inequality and the distribution of income in rural China from 1987 to 1999. We find an uneven but long‐run increase in inequality in rural China and show that nearly half of the rural population was not much better off in 1999 than at the start of the period. We rule out geography as the most important factor for explaining income differences and the increases that occurred over time. Much more important were growing differences between households living in the same village, province, or region. We also find that access to nonagricultural incomes from local wage employment and family businesses contributes to inequality but that employment outside the county in which a household lives and accessed through temporary migration is relatively equalizing. Finally, we document important strengths and weaknesses of the primary data set used for our analyses relative to other data sources available for study of inequality and poverty in rural China.


Economic Development and Cultural Change | 2006

Spatial Price Differences in China: Estimates and Implications

Loren Brandt; Carsten A. Holz

Prices differ across space: from province to province, from rural (or urban) areas in one province to rural (or urban) areas in another province, and from rural to urban areas within one province. Systematic differences in prices across a range of goods and services in different localities imply regional differences in the costs of living. If high‐income provinces also have high costs of living and low‐income provinces have low costs of living, the use of nominal income measures in explaining such economic outcomes as inequality can lead to misinterpretations. Income should be adjusted for costs of living. We are interested in the sign and magnitude of the adjustments needed, their changes over time, and their impact on economic outcomes in China. In this article, we construct a set of (rural, urban, total) provincial‐level spatial price deflators for the years 1984–2004 that can be used to obtain provincial‐level income measures adjusted for purchasing power. We provide illustrations of the significant effect of ignoring spatial price differences in the analysis of China’s economy.


Journal of Political Economy | 2000

Redistribution in a Decentralized Economy: Growth and Inflation in China under Reform

Loren Brandt; Xiaodong Zhu

Despite expanding at an annual rate of nearly 9 percent, Chinas economy has exhibited a marked cyclical pattern: Periods of rapid growth, accompanied by accelerating inflation, are followed by contractions during which both growth and inflation fall. A widening gap also emerged between the output contribution of the state sector and its share of investment and employment. In this paper, we offer a consistent explanation for this behavior that reflects several key institutional features of Chinas economic reform: (i) economic decentralization, (ii) the governments commitment to the state sector, and (iii) the credit plan and credit control.


Agricultural Economics | 1998

Tenure, land rights, and farmer investment incentives in China

Guo Li; Scott Rozelle; Loren Brandt

The goal of this paper is to understand the nature of the property rights associated with Chinas land tenure systems and to study the impact of these property rights on agricultural production efficiency. The results show that land tenure and associated property rights in rural China affect the production behavior of farmers. The most robust finding is that the right to use land for long periods of time encourages the use of land-saving investments. While the results show that land tenure affects agricultural production decisions, the difference between collective and private plots, however, is small compared to the private plotcommunal productivity gap that existed in the pre-reform period.


Canadian Journal of Economics | 2002

Property Rights, Labour Markets, and Efficiency in a Transition Economy: The Case of Rural China

Dwayne Benjamin; Loren Brandt

We investigate the consequences of imperfect factor market development for farm efficiency in North China. We estimate the extent to which an inverse relationship in farm productivity can be attributed to the administrative (as opposed to market) allocation of land, combined with unevenly developed off-farm opportunities. Using a new household survey, we find considerable inefficiency in the use of labour. This inefficiency is alleviated by external labour markets and, to a limited degree, by administrative reallocations. The reallocations do not go far enough, however, which raises important questions about constraints on rental activity and property rights formation more generally.


The Review of Economics and Statistics | 2017

Roads, Railroads and Decentralization of Chinese Cities

Nathaniel Baum-Snow; Loren Brandt; J. Vernon Henderson; Matthew A. Turner; Qinghua Zhang

We investigate how urban railroad and highway configurations have influenced urban form in Chinese cities since 1990. Each radial highway displaces 4% of central city population to surrounding regions, and ring roads displace about an additional 20%, with stronger effects in the richer coastal and central regions. Each radial railroad reduces central city industrial GDP by about 20%, with ring roads displacing an additional 50%. We provide evidence that radial highways decentralize service sector activity, radial railroads decentralize industrial activity, and ring roads decentralize both. Historical transportation infrastructure provides identifying variation in more recent measures of infrastructure.


Social Science Research Network | 2002

Agriculture and Income Distribution in Rural Vietnam under Economic Reforms: A Tale of Two Regions

Loren Brandt; Dwayne Benjamin

This paper exploits the panel dimension of the Vietnam Living Standards Survey (VLSS) in order to analyze the main changes occurring in agriculture in Vietnam over the period 1993-1998. This period was marked by a continuation of the reforms that began in 1988 with the implementation of Resolution 10, Vietnam s own version of the Chinese Household Responsibility System. We focus on the impact of two main policy changes: first, the increase in the rice export quota and the significant increase in the price of rice, especially in the south; and second, the liberalization of the fertilizer market and the sharp drop in the price of fertilizer. To this end, we document changes in the empirically observable institutional environment, exploring changes in rice and other crop prices as well as fertilizer prices. With this as background, we examine changes in rice production, consumption and marketing, and their links to changes in prices and incomes. We also estimate the degree to which these increases can be explained by increased use of inputs like fertilizer, cropping intensity, and increased yields. Finally, we investigate the distributional impacts of these changes, including a detailed examination of the linkages between rice marketing and income distribution using nonparametric econometric techniques. We find that the agricultural reforms had a largely beneficial impact on the well being of rural households throughout Vietnam, but that farmers in the south gained most, consistent with expectations given the policy changes. More generally, our conclusions suggest that market reforms can have a significant impact on incentives, without adverse consequences for income distribution.


Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics-zeitschrift Fur Die Gesamte Staatswissenschaft | 2004

Local Government Behavior and Property Right Formation in Rural China

Loren Brandt; Scott Rozelle; Matthew A. Turner

Secure land tenure is important to the development process, but Chinas rural reforms have so far failed to provide farm households with this security. We examine the political economy of land tenure and find that local governments sacrifice tenure security in the interests of efficiency and equity. Local rent seeking also plays an important role, and is a likely source of the under-development of land rental markets. Our results further suggest that decreases in distortionary taxes and increases in the integrity of elections will lead to more secure tenure and an increased reliance on market land exchange.


Archive | 2005

Income Inequality During China's Economic Transition

Dwayne Benjamin; Loren Brandt; John Giles; Sangui Wang

This paper provides an overview of the evolution of income inequality in China from 1987 to 2002, employing three series of data sets. Our focus is on both urban and rural inequality, as well as the urban-rural gap, with the objective of summarizing several “first-order” empirical patterns concerning the trajectory of inequality through the reform period. We document significant increases of inequality within China’s urban and rural populations. In rural areas, increased inequality is primarily related to the dis-equalizing role of non-agricultural self-employment income and slow growth in agricultural income from the mid-1990s onward. Poverty persists, and tied in part to slow growth in agricultural commodity prices. In urban areas, the declining role of subsidies and entitlements, the increase in wage inequality and the layoffs during restructuring, have fueled the growth in inequality within urban areas. Poverty levels, however, are very low. We find that spatial (regional) dimensions of inequality are significant, but are much less important than commonly believed for both the urban and rural populations, and for differences between urban and rural areas. Accounting for urban-rural reclassification, which otherwise exaggerates the rising urban-rural gap, we find a relatively stable ratio of urban to rural incomes. This hides some geographical variation, however: The urban-rural gap is increasing more rapidly in interior provinces, where SOE’s had a more dominant role in economic activity in urban areas, than in coastal provinces where the non-state sector was more important earlier in the reform period.

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Dwayne Benjamin

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

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John Giles

North Carolina State University

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J. Vernon Henderson

London School of Economics and Political Science

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