China's Provinces in Reform: Class, Community, and Political Culture

Do Political Connections Buffer Firms from or Bind Firms to the Government? A Study of Corporate Charitable Donations of Chinese Firms

“…Thus, a "hybrid" or "mixed" economy developed, whereby both the market and the state simultaneously influence firm behavior (Fligstein and Zhang 2011). In the most recent period, while the market has played an increasing role in allocating resources and shaping firm operations (Fan et al 2011), the government is still a key stakeholder driving a number of business strategies in China, particularly in regard to Downloaded from informs.org by [132.236.27 Two prominent institutional characteristics affect the relationship between political connections and corporate charitable donation in China. First, the government is a critical source of resources and legitimacy in China.…”

“…We capture the quality of market development of the firm's headquarters province using the well-established provincial marketization indices developed by the National Economic Research Institute (Fan et al 2011). We reverse coded this variable by subtracting the value of marketization index for each province from 12, which is the maximum possible value, to keep the direction of the measure consistent with our hypotheses.…”

“…(Wu et al 2012). Industry hence constitutes a firm's task environment (Thompson 1967), which is critical for firm survival and success.In contrast, regional market characteristics are more indicative of the quality of the general institutional infrastructure, such as government service/intervention, legal protection of property rights, contractual enforcements, and other related factors (Fan et al 2011, Ma et al 2013, since legal apparatuses are influenced by local governments in China instead of standing as independent entities (Ginsburg and Moustafa 2008). The resource dependence of the firm on regional institutional environment is comparatively less severe than that on industry.…”

The downside of marketization: A multilevel analysis of housing tenure and types in reform-era urban China

“…Proportion of foreign investment is a continuous variable to denote the proportion of industrial output invested by foreign capital to overall industrial output. This variable was obtained from China’s Statistical Yearbook for Regional Economy 2006 and it measures the level of marketization in capital market (Bian and Zhang, 2002, Fan and Wang, 2003). Ratio of non-state vs. state labor is a continuous variable to denote the ratio of state workers to non-state workers in a certain prefecture.…”

“…Subsequent studies measured the market transformation by a concrete variable relevant to economic performance (e.g., Xie and Hannum, 1996), such as GDP or industrial growth. Yet, it is argued that the market transformation is not equivalent to economic growth because the latter can be achieved by a variety of factors (such as technological innovations) other than a move towards a market-oriented economy (Fan and Wang, 2003). Based on this reasoning, we constructed multi-dimensional measures of market transformation by retrieving macro-level data from a varieties of official yearbooks, publications, and databases, which highlight several dimensions of the market transformation, such as labor market, capital market, product market and market environment (Bian and Zhang, 2002, Fan and Wang, 2003).…”