The high and rising household savings rate in China is not easily reconciled with the traditional explanations that emphasize life cycle factors, the precautionary saving motive, financial development, or habit formation. This paper proposes a new competitive saving motive: as the sex ratio rises, Chinese parents with a son raise their savings in a competitive manner in order to improve their son's relative attractiveness for marriage. The pressure on savings spills over to other households. Both cross-regional and household-level evidence supports this hypothesis. This factor can potentially account for about half the actual increase in the household savings rate during 1990-2007.

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.