| 简介： | Better institutions do not always advance technologies. China’s rural reforms during the early 1980s secured land tenure for peasants and dismantled large collective farms into small household farms, which transformed tillage technology. Using a novel data set of 1,755 counties from 1976 to 1988, our event study exploits the county-by-county rollout of the reform. We find that the use of tractors plummeted after the reform while the use of draft animals surged. Post-reform tractor use, however, became more efficient: it was more suitable to local factor endowments and related to higher grain yields. |