A Tale of Two Provinces: The Institutional Environment and Foreign Ownership in China

In this paper, we use a unique dataset covering joint ventures in two provinces of China, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, to test the effect of the institutional environment for domestic private firms on ownership structures of FDI projects. Unlike many studies on this subject, we approach the issue from the perspective of local firms seeking FDI rather than from the perspective of foreign firms seeking to invest in China. Applying the prevailing bargaining framework in studies on ownership structures of FDI projects, we find that a more liberal institutional environment for domestic private firms is associated with less foreign ownership of the joint ventures operating there. Several mechanisms can contribute to this outcome. One is that a more liberal institutional environment may enhance the bargaining power of those domestic firms negotiating with foreign firms to form alliances (the capability effect). The other mechanism is that a more liberal institutional environment may reduce some of the auxiliary benefits associated with FDI—such as greater property rights granted to foreign investors—and thereby attenuate incentive to form alliances with foreign firms (the incentive effect).http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40053/3/wp667.pd

A Tale of Two Provinces: The Institutional Environment and Foreign Ownership in China

In this paper, we use a unique dataset covering joint ventures in two provinces of China, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, to test the effect of the institutional environment for domestic private firms on ownership structures of FDI projects. Unlike many studies on this subject, we approach the issue from the perspective of local firms seeking FDI rather than from the perspective of foreign firms seeking to invest in China. Applying the prevailing bargaining framework in studies on ownership structures of FDI projects, we find that a more liberal institutional environment for domestic private firms is associated with less foreign ownership of the joint ventures operating there. Several mechanisms can contribute to this outcome. One is that a more liberal institutional environment may enhance the bargaining power of those domestic firms negotiating with foreign firms to form alliances (the capability effect). The other mechanism is that a more liberal institutional environment may reduce some of the auxiliary benefits associated with FDI—such as greater property rights granted to foreign investors—and thereby attenuate incentive to form alliances with foreign firms (the incentive effect).China, FDI, private sector, institutional environment, joint venture

Learning Face Age Progression: A Pyramid Architecture of GANs

The two underlying requirements of face age progression, i.e. aging accuracy and identity permanence, are not well studied in the literature. In this paper, we present a novel generative adversarial network based approach. It separately models the constraints for the intrinsic subject-specific characteristics and the age-specific facial changes with respect to the elapsed time, ensuring that the generated faces present desired aging effects while simultaneously keeping personalized properties stable. Further, to generate more lifelike facial details, high-level age-specific features conveyed by the synthesized face are estimated by a pyramidal adversarial discriminator at multiple scales, which simulates the aging effects in a finer manner. The proposed method is applicable to diverse face samples in the presence of variations in pose, expression, makeup, etc., and remarkably vivid aging effects are achieved. Both visual fidelity and quantitative evaluations show that the approach advances the state-of-the-art.Comment: CVPR 2018. V4 and V2 are the same, i.e. the conference version; V3 is a related but different work, which is mistakenly submitted and will be submitted as a new arXiv pape