Seminar Bottom-up Institutional Change and Growth: Theory and Evidence from China Macroeconomics Seminar Add to calendar 2024-03-27 11:00 2024-03-27 12:15 Europe/Rome Bottom-up Institutional Change and Growth: Theory and Evidence from China Seminar Room 3rd Floor Villa La Fonte YYYY-MM-DD Print Share: Share on Facebook Share on BlueSky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Send by email Scheduled dates Mar 27 2024 11:00 - 12:15 CET Seminar Room 3rd Floor, Villa La Fonte Organised by Department of Economics Xiaodong Zhu (Hong Kong Business School) will present the paper 'Bottom-up Institutional Change and Growth: Theory and Evidence from China'. We build a large textual database that covers all local government activities at county level across China for the period of 1976 to 2005, and use a textual analysis method to identify and measure local policy changes and their diffusion across space in China. We show that bottom-up policy innovations tend to increase GDP growth through improvement in TFP, while central government sponsored policy experiments tend to increase GDP growth through capital accumulation. We also develop a quantitative model that is consistent with the empirical facts and use it to quantify the contribution of bottom-up institutional change to TFP growth in China.Co-Authors: Heng Chen, Bingjing Li