Although entry regulations are ubiquitous across countries, comprehensive evaluations on how such regulations affect firm dynamics and productivity are lacking. We examine a 2012-2014 pilot program in Guangdong (which later became a national policy) that was designed to reduce firm registration costs and encourage entrepreneurial activities. Using administrative data on firms' business registrations and annual reports, our analysis shows that the reform increased firm entry by 25% and firm exit by 8.7% in the manufacturing sector. The productivity of post-reform entrants was 1.1% higher than the productivity of pre-reform entrants, likely due to relaxed financial constraints and more intense competition.

This paper exploits the universe of credit- and debit-card transactions in China during 2013-2015 and provides the first nationwide analysis of the healthcare cost of PM 2.5 for a developing country. We leverage spatial spillovers of PM 2.5 from long-range transport to generate exogenous variation in local pollution and employ a flexible distributed lag model to capture semiparametrically the dynamic response of pollution exposure. We find significant impacts of PM 2.5 on healthcare spending in both the short and medium terms. A 10 μ g / m 3 decrease in PM 2.5 would reduce annual healthcare spending by over $9.2 billion, about 1.5% of China's annual healthcare expenditure.