Work on this book was funded by a 2005–2006 Scholar Grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and I am immeasurably grateful for this support. Some of the initial research was conducted while I was a Visiting Senior Fellow at Hawaii's East-West Center, which provided a very hospitable and helpful environment for my work. My home institution, Claremont McKenna College, also helped with support for databases and other research needs.

I have been fortunate to work with many excellent co-authors over the years, and I am grateful to a number of them for kindly consenting to have some of their joint work presented in this volume. In particular, I wish to thank William Brown and Pierre Siklos, as well as my former students Gregory Arquette, Emily Kochanowicz, and Hsin-hui I. H. Whited, for their contributions to several of the chapters in this volume. Gregory Arquette also played a major role in keeping the analysis of China's securities markets as up-to-date as possible, allowing the book manuscript to incorporate the most recent numbers available at the time.

Chapters 3 and 6 include material previously published by the Cato Journal and the China Economic Review. I thank Jim Dorn, editor of the Cato Journal, and Elsevier, publisher of the China Economic Review, for their respective permission to reprint.

This book greatly benefited from three excellent sets of reviewer comments, including those kindly provided by Jim Dorn and Elliott Parker.