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The authors show that judicial independence can reduce local protectionism and foster cross-regional economic integration. The authors exploit a judicial independence reform in China with staggered roll-out since 2014. The reform removed local governments’ control over local courts’ financial and personnel decisions, thereby substantially improving local courts’ independence. Combining novel data on the universes of civil lawsuits and business registration records, the authors show that local defendants’ rate of winning court cases against non-local plaintiffs declined by 7.0% after the reform. The effect is mainly driven by improvements in the quality of judicial decisions and is more salient for politically connected local defendants. Over time, the reduction in local protectionism encouraged smaller non-local firms to file lawsuits against larger local firms. Using the shareholding network extracted from business registration records, the authors find that the decline in local protectionism could attract 8.4% more inward investment flows into reformed localities. This has the potential to increase China’s GDP by 1.9% when the judicial independence reform is implemented nationwide.

Thesis: S.M. in Management Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2017., Thesis: S.M. in Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2017., Cataloged from PDF version of thesis., Includes bibliographical references (pages 51-52)., There is little evidence that the expansion of microfinance has reduced poverty, but is instead increasingly associated with problematic multiple borrowing at high interest rates and high levels of debt and default. We develop a model that rationalizes these outcomes-if entrepreneurs cannot commit to exclusive borrowing from a single lender, expanding financial access by introducing multiple lenders may severely backfire. Capital allocation is distorted away from the most productive uses. Entrepreneurs choose inefficient and limited-growth endeavors. These problems are exacerbated when borrowers have access to more lenders, explaining why increased access to finance does not always improve outcomes., by Daniel Green and Ernest Siyuan Liu., S.M. in Management Research, S.M. in Economics

We develop a dynamic spatial general equilibrium model with forward-looking investment and migration decisions. We characterize analytically the transition path of the spatial distribution of economic activity in response to shocks. We apply our framework to the re-allocation of US economic activity from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt from 1965-2015. We find slow convergence to steady-state, with US states closer to steady-state at the end of our sample period than at its beginning. We find substantial heterogeneity in the effects of local shocks, which depend on capital and labor dynamics, and the spatial and sectoral incidence of these shocks.

We develop sufficient statistics of countries’ bilateral income and welfare exposure to foreign productivity shocks that are exact for small shocks in the class of models with a constant trade elasticity. For large shocks, we characterize the quality of the approximation, and show it to be almost exact. We compute these sufficient statistics for over 140 countries from 1970-2012. We show that our exposure measures depend on market-size, cross-substitution and cost of living effects. As countries become greater economic friends in terms of welfare exposure, they become greater political friends in terms of United Nations voting and strategic rivalries.

Large-scale changes in relative economic size necessarily involve heightened political tension and realignments, write Benny Kleinman, Ernest Liu and Stephen Redding

We generalize the closed-economy neoclassical growth model (CNGM) to allow for costly goods trade and capital flows with imperfect substitutability between countries. We develop a tractable, multi-country, quantitative model that matches key features of the observed data (e.g., gravity equations for trade and capital holdings) and is well suited for analyzing counterfactual policies that affect both goods and capital market integration (e.g., U.S.-China decoupling). We show that goods and capital market integration interact in non-trivial ways to shape impulse responses to counterfactual changes in productivity and goods and capital market frictions and the speed of convergence to steady-state.