| This dissertation consists of three essays that study the industrial organization of China's manufacturing sector from an empirical perspective. It uses structural estimation to look into the performance of China's manufacturing sector with a particular emphasis on the steel industry - a key sector in China that produces half of the world's steel. This dissertation also examines the financial constraints that manufacturing firms face.;Chapter 1 documents the development of the steel industry in the past two decades. Chapter 2 studies productivity differences in vertically-integrated Chinese steel facilities, using a unique dataset that provides equipment-level information on inputs and output in physical units for each of the three main stages in the steel value chain, i.e., sintering, iron-making and steel making. We find that private integrated facilities are more productive than provincial state-owned facilities, followed by central state-owned facilities. This ranking lines up with our productivity estimates in the two downstream production stages, but central state-owned facilities outperform in sintering, most likely because of their superior access to high-quality raw materials. The productivity differential favoring private facilities declines with the size of integrated facilities, turning negative for facilities larger than the median. We attribute this pattern to differences in the internal configuration of integrated facilities, which re ect the greater constraints confronting expanding privat facilities. Increasing returns to scale within each stage of production partially offset these costs, and rationalize choices of larger facilities.;Chapter 3 draws on the Chinese Industrial Survey Data from 1998 to 2007 to examine financing constraints in the manufacturing sector. Building on the Euler Equation approach and applying the dynamic GMM estimation, we find that on average private firms face more obstacles in accessing credit than state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Contrary to the widely accepted view that China's private sector is largely excluded from formal credit allocation, we find that large firms, both state-owned and private, are not credit constrained. Medium and small SOEs are financially constrained, although to an extent less than their private counterparts of similar size. Moreover, the capabilities of firms in accessing external finance differ by economic region and across industries.e. |
