This book is my Ph.D. dissertation which I have finished at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The topic of the book is the land cooperative program in rural China, a widely implemented policy which aims to consolidate agricultural land by encouraging individual households to transfer land to land cooperatives and then to collectively manage the land. In the book, I analyze household and village level data from two cities, Suzhou and Yangzhou, in Jiangsu Province, China. At the core of this book is the question how local context and household’ characteristics interact with the implementation of the land cooperative program. The book has five chapters, including an introduction chapter, a conclusion chapter and three empirical chapters. In chapter one, I introduce the background of the reserach and highlight the importance of the work. In chapter two, I explore the impact of different local context variables on the relative amount of land managed by land cooperatives across villages. In chapter three, I investigate the determinants of households’ cooperative membership and its implication on labor allocation. In chapter four, I analyze how and what is the impact of cooperative members' participation in decision-making processes within the cooperative organization. In chapter five, I summarize the main findings and raise policy implications.weiterlesen