Do institutions matter? Estimating the effect of institutions on economic performance in China

This paper estimates the effect of institutions on economic performance using cross-city data from China. We argue that China's ongoing reforms are part of a long and circuitous historical transition from antiquity to modernity, which started about 150 years ago. Learning from Western countries has been a central aspect of this historical process. The West had a laThis paper estimates the effect of institutions on economic performance using cross-city data from China. We argue that China's ongoing reforms are part of a long and circuitous historical transition from antiquity to modernity, which started about 150 years ago. Learning from Western countries has been a central aspect of this historical process. The West had a large influence on the early stage of this transition, which has persisted to current reforms. This study uses the enrollment in Christian missionary lower primary schools in China in 1919 as an instrument for present institutions. Employing a two-stage least squares method, we find that the effect of institutions on economic performance in China is positive and significant. The results are robust according to various tests including additional controls, such as geographic factors and government policy-related variables.institutions; christian; geography; policy

Constraints on anomalous quartic gauge couplings via WγjjW\gamma jj production at the LHC

The vector boson scattering at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is sensitive to anomalous quartic gauge couplings (aQGCs). In this paper, we investigate the aQGC contribution to $W \gamma jj$ production at the LHC with $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV in the context of an effective field theory (EFT). The unitarity bound is applied as a cut on the energy scale of this production process, which is found to have significant suppressive effects on the signals. To enhance the statistical significance, we analyse the kinematic and polarization features of the aQGC signals in detail. We find that the polarization effects induced by the aQGCs are unique and can discriminate the signals from the SM backgrounds well. With the proposed event selection strategy, we obtain the constraints on the coefficients of dimension-8 operators with current luminosity. The results indicate that the process $pp \to W \gamma jj$ is powerful for searching for the $O_{M_{2,3,4,5}}$ and $O_{T_{5,6,7}}$ operators.Comment: 29 pages, 11 figures, 7 tables, to be published in Chinese Physics