Gary H. Jefferson

Gary H. Jefferson
Brandeis University · Department of Economics

PhD economics, Yale University

About

100
Publications
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7,085
Citations

Publications

Publications (100)
Article
Full-text available
Based on a unique dataset of China’s granted patents, we explore the role of inventors’ gender diversity in patent transfers. We find that city-level inventor-gender diversity promotes patent transfer. Using data from China’s 283 prefectural cities, our mechanism analysis reveals that that a gender-diverse inventor group is better at producing radi...
Chapter
The Oxford Handbook of China Innovation provides a contemporary and authoritative view of the role of innovation in China’s extraordinary emergence. The Handbook consists of chapters written by over sixty experts from universities and research institutions worldwide, who describe and analyze this phenomenon with criticism, discussion of policy issu...
Article
This article compares China’s science and technology advance with the US, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. Using World Intellectual Property Organization and United States Patent and Trademark Office data for the number and quality of patent grants issued by foreign patent offices, several results stand out. First, withi...
Article
This paper uses patent data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to investigate the association between inventor collaboration and joint assignee ownership, both domestic and international, and patent quality as measured by the number of claims and citations associated with a patent. Specifically, we compare the quality implications of researc...
Article
China’s surge into global middle-income status over the space of three decades has been spectacular. However, a potentially large and burdensome cost has been imposed on a generation of adolescents and young adults who abandoned the countryside, and with it access to basic education, in order to seek the anticipated advantages of jobs in the countr...
Article
Full-text available
Over the past two decades, China's R&D intensity has surged. The institutional arrangements underlying this surge remain unclear. We study the notable restructuring of the country's 5,000 research institutes, begun in 1999. This study first reviews the evolution of China's research institute sector over the period 1995–2010. Then applying OLS, fixe...
Article
This paper examines how industrial policy – specifically tariff liberalization and tax subsidies – affects the magnitude and direction of FDI spillovers. We examine these spillover effects across the diverse ownership structure of China’s manufacturing sector for 1998 through 2007. We find that tariff reforms, particularly tariff reductions associa...
Article
This paper investigates a large body of research for the purpose of sorting out the variety of data-sets, research methods, and findings that have emerged over the past decade concerning FDI productivity spillovers in Chinese industry. The review includes 16 papers, which together represent a striking range of data-sets, models, econometric strateg...
Article
This paper evaluates the impact of the Chinese government’s initiative begun in 1999 to restructure the country’s approximately 3,500 research institutes. The paper reviews the evolution of China’s research sector over the period 1995 to 2010, identifying certain issues that are analyzed using a panel of sample research institutes. The econometric...
Chapter
China’s economic transformation demonstrates that the paths of transition and development are broader and more varied than generally predicted by economic research relating to other countries. Research focused on China’s experience contributes to the scope and richness of the economics literature in notable ways. The China literature illustrates an...
Article
Full-text available
Over the past three decades, China's political leadership has retained legitimacy in large part due to the country's robust economic growth and rising living standards. Economic prosperity was achieved by reassigning a range of property rights from the state to individuals and thereby incentivizing much of China's population. China's economic trans...
Article
This paper investigates two prominent potential drivers of long-run economic growth: a country’s trade regime and its intellectual property rights (IPR) regime, as well as their interaction. We characterize the combination of these policy-driven regimes as a country’s technology development regime. To test the importance of our specification of the...
Article
The neoclassical model argues that environmental regulations impede industrial performance. In this paper, we shed light on two features of environmental regulations in developing countries that have received little attention and that give rise to unexpected outcomes with respect to industry performance. First, compliance to regulations is likely t...
Article
In the face of foreign entry, domestic firms may exhibit heterogeneous patterns of response depending on their technological distance from foreign firms. Domestic firms closer to the foreign technology frontier may choose to compete, while firms that are further down on the technology ladder may suffer a "discouragement effect" and lag further behi...
Article
Full-text available
As with many developing countries, the Chinese government hopes that knowledge brought by multinationals will spill over to domestic industries and increase their productivity. In this paper, we show that foreign investment originating outside of Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan has positive effects on individual firm level productivity, while foreign...
Article
In principle, returns to factors of production within single economic systems should exhibit relatively uniform returns. Notwithstanding the fact that over the past 30 years China's economy has increasingly liberalized both internally and externally, it is widely understood that wages received by industrial workers in the coast and interior have wi...
Article
This article investigates the conditions that may auger a reversal of China's increasingly unequal levels of regional industrial productivity during China's first two decades of economic reform. Using international and Chinese firm and industry data over the period 1995–2004, we estimate a productivity growth–technology gap reaction function. We fi...
Article
Full-text available
The authors investigate how institutions affect productivity spillovers from foreign direct investment (FDI) to China's domestic industrial enterprises during 1998-2007. They examine three institutional features that comprise aspects of China's "special characteristics": (1) the different sources of FDI, where FDI is nearly evenly divided between m...
Article
China's industry has experienced robust growth under persistent structural reform since 1978. By estimating the stochastic frontier sectoral production function, we find that the TFP growth has exceeded the quantitative growth of inputs since 1992, but the contribution of productivity to output growth declines after 2001. Using a decomposition tech...
Article
This paper compares China’s labor productivity growth across different regions and industries, and investigates how the initial productivity gaps with the international frontier affect their subsequent productivity growth. Using data aggregated from the firm level, the research yields overwhelming empirical evidence that during the period of 1995-2...
Chapter
Over the past 20 years, patenting in China has grown at a rapid rate, having notably surged since 1999. And yet China’s recent patent explosion has taken place in an institutional environment that is not known for the rule of law and rigorous protection of intellectual property rights. Such institutional deficiencies might have made it futile for i...
Article
China's patent surge, documented in this paper, is seemingly paradoxical given the country's weak record of protecting intellectual property rights. Using a firm-level data set that spans the population of China's large and medium-size industrial enterprises, this paper explores the factors that account for China's rising patent activity. While the...
Article
Full-text available
Abstract China’s industry has experienced robust growth under persistent structural reform since 1978. By estimating the stochastic frontier function, we find that the averaged TFP growth has exceeded the quantitative growth of inputs since 1992, but the con- tribution of productivity to output growth declines after 2001. Using a decomposition tech...
Article
This paper investigates the phenomenon of individual firms simultaneously developing and adopting technical change with varying factor biases. Firms in a large panel of Chinese industrial enterprise data exhibit three channels of technical change, each associated with different patterns of firm-level factor bias and strategic purpose. The neo-class...
Article
Full-text available
China’s economic transformation demonstrates that the paths of transition and development are broader and more varied than generally predicted by economic research relating to other countries. Research focused on China’s experience contributes to the scope and richness of the economics literature in notable ways. The China literature illustrates an...
Article
Economists agree that the long-term growth of living standards depends on the capacity of an economy to sustain technological progress, whether by adopting technologies from abroad, through its own technological innovations, or, most likely, through a combination of adoption and innovation. The purpose of this chapter is to describe and analyze Chi...
Article
Full-text available
Using a firm-level data set for 1998 and 2005 including all of China's 'above designated size' enterprises that together account for more than 85% of China's industrial output, this paper investigates three issues. One key issue in China's industrial system is the extent to which growth has been driven by productivity change. A second issue is the...
Article
China's ratio of research and development (R&D) spending to its gross domestic product (GDP) more than doubled from 0.6 per cent in 1996 to 1.4 per cent in 2005. This study documents the pattern of science and technology (S & T) take-off, characterized by an abrupt increase in the R&D to GDP ratio. This abrupt increase, observed in many of the now...
Chapter
Over the last two decades, China has received large inflows of foreign direct investment, and since 2000 (FDI), the country has emerged as the leading recipient of FDI. While FDI per capita in China is not substantially higher than for all of Southeast Asia, the sheer size of China’s population has enabled the country to stand out as the worlds lea...
Article
Understanding the range of impacts of technological innovation and diffusion in a large carbon-intensive country like China is important for understanding the future trajectory of global carbon emissions. In this paper, we utilize a uniquely rich data set of Chinese firm characteristics and technological innovation activities to identify the key de...
Article
Studies of the impact of privatization on enterprise performance encounter difficult issues of selection bias, endogeneity, and adjustment costs. In this paper, we analyze the performance impact of conversion on China's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) taking these issues into account. We also distinguish between the direct effect of formal conversio...
Article
Full-text available
This research, which investigates a set of fundamental relationships in the R&D literature, is based on an unusually rich set of panel data covering the population of China's large and medium-size manufacturing enterprises. Using a recursive three-equation system, we investigate the determinants of firm-level R&D intensity, the process of knowledge...
Article
Full-text available
China’s economic transformation is proceeding at different rates across different regions and sectors, and China’s most advanced regional sector, coastal industry, still lags well behind the world’s technology frontier. This paper explores the implications of these internal and international productivity disparities for China’s ability to sustain r...
Article
Full-text available
In bridging the technology gap with the OECD nations, developing economies have access to three avenues of technological advance: domestic R&D, technology transfer, and foreign direct investment. This paper examines the contributions of each of these avenues, as well as their interactions, to productivity within Chinese industry. Based on a large d...
Article
While energy intensity in China has fallen almost continuously since the onset of economic reform in the late 1970s, beginning in 1996 the data show a striking decline in China’s absolute level of energy use. Most of this decline can be accounted for by falling coal consumption in the industrial sector. In order to investigate this energy puzzle, t...
Article
This paper estimates returns to research and development (R&D) in Chinese industry. Using a firm-level data set on innovation activity in large- and medium-size industrial enterprises during 1991–1997 in the Beijing area, we estimate three equations—an R&D expenditure equation, a production function, and a profit function. Panel data estimation met...
Article
During the 1980s and early half of the 1990s, the entry of new firms, the strengthening of managerial incentives, and the accumulation of non-state assets in the state sector set the stage for China's shareholding experiment, involving the formal conversion of thousands of state-owned enterprises to joint stock companies. Shareholding conversions h...
Article
The capacity of developing economies to narrow the gap in living standards with the OECD nations depends critically on their ability to imitate and innovate new technologies. Toward this end, developing economies have access to three avenues of technological advance: technology transfer, domestic R&D, and foreign direct investment. This paper exami...
Article
Full-text available
During the 1980s, the restructuring of Chinese industry was driven principally by the entry of new enterprises into the enterprise system and by the restructuring of managerial incentives. In 1993, China’s leadership formally inaugurated the shareholding experiment. This paper examines the impact on eight performance measures of the conversion of b...
Article
The capacity of developing economies to narrow the gap in living standards with the OECD nations depends critically on their ability to imitate and innovate new technologies. Toward this end, developing economies have access to three avenues of technological advance: technology transfer, domestic R&D, and foreign direct investment. This paper exami...
Article
China's 22,000 large and medium-size enterprises stand at the pinnacle of Chinese industry. While they account for less than a fraction of a percent of China's nearly 8 million industrial enterprises, they collectively account for one-third of the nation's total industrial output. Using a panel of these enterprise data for 1994-1999, we find a rapi...
Article
his paper contrasts state–directed and market–mediated reform of enterprise ownership rights in transition economies. We evaluate China's emerging market for enterprise ownership rights from the perspective of conditions underpinning the Coase Theorem: the assignment of property rights, the degree of competition, and the nature of transaction costs...
Article
This paper contrasts state-directed and market-mediated reform of enterprise ownership rights in transition economies. We evaluate China's emerging market for enterprise ownership rights from the perspective of conditions underpinning the Coase Theorem: the assignment of property rights, the degree of competition, and the nature of transaction cost...
Article
Full-text available
This paper contrasts state-directed and market–mediated reform of enterprise ownership rights in transition economies. We evaluate China's emerging market for enterprise ownership rights from the perspective of conditions underpinning the Coase Theorem: the assignment of property rights, the degree of competition, and the nature of transaction cost...
Article
Using a large sample of large and medium size enterprises in China's electronic and textile industries, we investigate the impact of FDI on the productivity and sales of domestic firms. The rest of the paper is organised into four further sections. Section 2 describes the data used in this paper and provides a preliminary comparison between domesti...
Article
Full-text available
Galbraith has developed an original theory on public utilities, that is analyzed and compared with other theories. In the present-day context, with an influential discourse against State intervention, we ask if the arguments of Galbraith are outdated and we show that they are always useful to the opponents to neolibe-ralism.
Article
This paper proposes a generic framework for analyzing innovation systems, anchored around five fundamental activities — R&D, implementation, end-use, education, linkage — and focused on the performance implications of a system's structure and dynamics. Rather than simply describing the role and performance of particular actors, institutions and pol...
Article
Full-text available
This paper develops a general theory of the commons, which is used here to explain the institutional origins of financial crisis. The process of development or transition typically involves a sequence in which property rights are clarified first for individuals, later for firms, and still later for higher-level economic institutions, including the...
Article
This paper investigates Chinese industrial productivity from 1980 to 1996. Results include series for foreign-linked, shareholding, and private enterprises. We find long-term productivity increase, with growth rates declining during the 1990's. Productivity outcomes outside the state and collective sectors are modest, with shareholding enterprises...
Article
Full-text available
The reform of China's enterprise system increasingly reflects the outcome of China's emerging property rights market. We distinguish between a centrally-directed reform strategy, with characteristics similar to those of a Pigouvian tax, and a market-driven reform process, which captures the essential features of a Coasian approach to social cost. T...
Article
Full-text available
This paper characterizes a key feature of the classic socialist economy and state-owned enterprise, namely that of missing markets in labor quality. Under the socialist regime in which students and workers were assigned to work units, the rights of managers to monitor and reward workers were limited. The exchange of labor services was based more on...
Article
China’s monetary policy applies to two sets of monetary policy instruments: (i) instruments of the Central Bank (CB), the People’s Bank of China (PBC); and (ii) non-Central Bank (NCB) policy instruments. Additionally, the PBC’s instruments include: (i) price-based indirect; and (ii) quantity-based direct instruments. The simultaneous usage of these...
Article
To address issues surrounding innovative behavior at the microeconomic level, we designed a survey that was administered by China's State Statistics Bureau to 254 industrial enterprises in and around seven large Chinese cities during 1990/91. The samle is evenly divided among three branches of industry: cotton textiles, electronic components, and i...
Article
This paper extends measures of total factor productivity (TFP) for China's state and collective industry to cover the period 1980–1992, analyzes issues raised by critics of previous studies, and evaluates the robustness of productivity results. TFP increased in both major segments of Chinese industry throughout 1980–1992. The analysis of measuremen...
Article
Recent research by Woo, Fan, Hai, and Jin (1993a, 1993b, 1993c, henceforth WFHJ) raises important issues about the derivation and significance of estimated changes in total factor productivity (TFP) in Chinese industry. This comment focuses on three matters: (1) WFHJ's specific criticisms of our own work in this area; (2) limitations of the sample...
Article
This paper analyzes the forces driving the technological and institutional transformation of china's textile and apparel industries. It begins with a complete description of innovation ladders, and then provides a brief description of China's textile and apparel industry during the past decade. Examples are then used from the recent experience of C...
Article
In China early attempts at partial reform unleashed forces that, fifteen years later, have brought China's economy to the brink of a market system. The participation of tens of thousands of enterprises and millions of administrators, managers, and workers over the duration of the reform eventually built a constituency for market-directed change tha...
Article
Full-text available
This article formulates and applies an approach for measuring gains in productive efficiency among socialist enterprises in transition. Using established theory and microlevel data, the article evaluates the progress of China's industrial enterprises toward satisfying one of the principal efficiency conditions of a competitive market economy, namel...
Article
Full-text available
This paper begins by using a structure-conduct-performance perspective to show that partial reform improved the operation of China's state industries during the 1980s. The authors review the achievements of industries outside the state sector, emphasizing their links to the state sector. The paper focuses on key defects in the industrial system rel...
Article
The paper analyzes the structure and phasing of China's reform programs since 1978, evaluates China's economic performance in a comparative context, and assesses the causal relationships between reforms and performance. It concludes that China's economic performance has indeed been very strong, comparable with the rapidly growing economies of East...
Article
Full-text available
The authors try to answer important questions. How important is the phasing of political and economic liberalization and the active (versus passive) role of the state in reform? What lessons can be learned about comprehensive top-down reform as opposed to experimental bottom-up reforms; fast versus slow liberalization and opening up of the economy;...
Article
The paper reviews and comments on current research regarding four areas of Chinese industry. These are: 1) changes in the performance and behavior of state-owned enterprises; 2) proposals for ownership and property rights reform; 3) other policy and institutional issues pertaining to reform of state-owned enterprises; and 4) the role of non-state e...
Article
Learning from successes in agricultural development is now more urgent than ever. Progress in feeding the world’s billions has slowed, while the challenge of meeting future food needs remains enormous and is subject to new uncertainties in the global food and agricultural systems. In the late 1950s around a billion people were estimated to go hungr...
Article
In China, as in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, economic reform initiatives seek to increase productivity by introducing elements of market-oriented policies and institutions into an economy formerly dominated by state planning. This study expands the prior framework of analysis in several directions. Our investigation of productivity trends i...
Article
The purpose is to sketch the dilemma surrounding Chinese policy toward urban unemployment, and to suggest a possible response. Our analysis begins with a brief review of available information on open urban unemployment in the 1980s. Next, we describe the dimensions and consequences of the more serious matter of underemployment in China's urban econ...
Article
This paper investigates the degree to which socialist enterprises in transition mimic the behavior of the canonical neoclassical firm. Using enterprise survey data, we find evidence that Chinese factory managers economize on factor inputs in response to increases in managerial autonomy and market orientation. In addition, we find evidence of increa...
Article
Using Chinese data which by standards of western industrial analysis is deficient but in other respects is quite rich, this paper corrects for these deficiencies and exploits the richness of the data set by (i) investigating the technological properties of China's iron and steel industry, (ii) identifying the sources of productivity variation among...
Article
This paper presents an approach for modeling and estimating potential sources of productivity growth within four major sectors of Chinese industry—the state and collective sectors and heavy and light industry. The findings, based upon industrial data from293 Chinese counties, indicate that substantial productivity gains can be achieved by transferr...
Article
Measures of society's stock of fixed assets are necessary for describing production technology, evaluating capital-output ratios and analysing multi-factor productivity. Even in advanced industrial economies, existing series of fixed capital incorporate many weaknesses and arbitrary assumptions; in low-income nations, these problems are often sever...
Article
Previous studies of productivity change in Chinese industry show that stagnating productivity has persisted into the 1980s in spite of China's reform efforts. Once non-industrial resources are excluded from published factor input data and fixed assets are corrected for inflation, China's state industry shows a positive rate of multifactor productiv...
Article
This paper expands the Verdoorn model to include factor substitutes for labor, short-run productivity dynamics, and specific economic processes through which the growth of output may induce productivity growth. The paper compares the level and rate-of-change versions of three models. Estimated with U.S. manufacturing data, the level version of a mo...
Article
Full-text available
China's ratio of R&D spending to its GDP more than doubled from 0.6 percent in 1996 to 1.4 percent in 2005. This paper documents the pattern of science and technology (S&T) takeoff, characterized by an abrupt increase in the R&D to GDP ratio. This abrupt increase, observed in many of the now OECD countries, typically drives R&D intensity from below...
Article
Full-text available
This paper documents the pattern of science and technology (S&T) takeoff, which is characterized by abrupt increases in the R&D expenditure to GDP ratio from below one percent to more than two percent in a number of OECD countries, particularly the larger economies. It also documents indications of nascent S&T takeoff in several large developing ec...
Article
Using an unusually rich set of data for China's large and medium-size manufacturing enterprises that span seven ownership types, this paper investigates three fundamental questions that shape the R&D literature. These questions - the determinants of firm-level R&D intensity, the process of knowledge production, and the impact of innovation on firm...
Article
Full-text available
This paper compares China's labor productivity growth across different regions and industries, and investigates how the initial productivity gaps with the international frontier affect their subsequent productivity growth. Using data aggregated from the firm level, the research yields overwhelming empirical evidence that during the period of 1995-2...

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