Control, Incentives and Competition: The Impact of Reform on Chinese State-owned Enterprises

Through the lens of the theory of the firm, I examine how a series of reforms affected the performance of Chinese state-owned enterprises with a panel dataset of more than 500 firms. The study finds that performance improved with various reforms such as increasing competition, appointing new managers, using firm-level pay sensitivity, raising marginal profit retention rates and allowing managers to determine wages and to make production decisions. Adopting performance contracts did not improve performance significantly. These results confirm the importance of competition, control rights, managerial and internal incentives, as emphasized by the theory of the firm.