We review how knowledge spillovers, government coordination, and urban planning jointly shape the resilience of innovation clusters, with a focus on China.

How does the state integrate peripheral populations into the national community in the absence of widespread literacy? I study this question through the rollout of wired broadcasting (youxian guangbo) across rural China during the 1950s–1990s — an auditory infrastructure that bypassed literacy barriers and projected national institutions directly into village life. Exploiting the staggered rollout driven by the 1956 National Agricultural Development Plan, I link county-level infrastructure data to census microdata and use household fixed-effects comparing siblings within families. The paper examines whether broadcasting increased engagement with the state education system.

We decompose house prices into intrinsic value and bubble components and show how urban characteristics drive price distortions across Chinese cities.

We document heterogeneous patterns of intergenerational housing wealth transmission across Chinese birth cohorts from 1935 to 2003.