We conduct a large-scale, nondeceptive field experiment to elicit preferences for government participation in China's venture capital and private equity market. Our main result is that the average firm dislikes investors with government ties. We show that such dislike is not present with government-owned firms and that this dislike is highest with best-performing firms. Additional results and surveys suggest that political interference in decision-making is the leading reason why government investors are unattractive to private firms. Overall, our findings point to the limits of a model of “state capitalism” that strongly relies on the complementarity between private firms and government capital to drive high-growth entrepreneurship and innovation.

We incorporate forward‐looking capital accumulation into a dynamic discrete choice model of migration. We characterize the steady‐state equilibrium; generalize existing dynamic exact‐hat algebra techniques to incorporate investment; and linearize the model to provide an analytical characterization of the economy's transition path using spectral analysis. We show that capital and labor dynamics interact to shape the economy's speed of adjustment toward steady state. We implement our quantitative analysis using data on capital stocks, populations, and bilateral trade and migration flows for U.S. states from 1965–2015. We show that this interaction between capital and labor dynamics plays a central role in explaining the observed decline in the rate of income convergence across U.S. states and the persistent and heterogeneous impact of local shocks.