Bringing Dead Capital to Life: Property Rights Security in China
利用中国2007年《物权法》作为准自然实验，基于1998-2012年全量企业数据，发现该法增加了私有企业数量、提高了存活率和产出，同时促进了资本向高生产率企业（如出口企业）的重新配置。
China’s 2007 Property Law provides a rare large-scale quasi experiment to examine the impact of restoring property rights protections for privately owned assets. We test hypotheses about property rights insecurity using novel firm-level administrative data that cover the universe of Chinese firms from 1998 to 2012. We find evidence confirming the counterfactual to de Soto’s “dead” capital, wherein the law increased new privately owned firms and enabled more firms to survive the early years and produce more; the converse to be true for state-owned enterprises, which indicates the law’s role—indeed, intent—to reallocate; and evidence of capital reallocation in the birth of more productive firms, specifically firms that became exporters.