Table 1 provides information on key characteristics separately for sample villages in the 2004-07 ‘before’ reform period (col. 2 and 3 for villages outside and inside the Chengdu prefecture boundary, respectively) and the 2010-13 ‘after’ reform period (col. 5 and 6 for villages outside and inside the boundary). To test for pre-reform trends in outcome variable Y _it_ , we use the 2004-07sample to estimate ��� ������� ������ � ������� ����where _Ci_ is an indicator variable for location in Chengdu prefecture and _Tit_ is a time trend while _β2_ and _β2_ + _β3_ are estimates of the pre-reform trend for villages outside and inside Chengdu, respectively. As significance of _β3_ implies rejection of the parallel trend assumption, we report the level of significance of _β3_ in table 1 col. 7.

Although they were rather close to Chengdu city, villages predominantly depended on agriculture as a source of livelihood. Before the reform (i.e. in 2004-07), about 58% of the labor force (61% and 55% outside and inside the prefecture boundary) had their main occupation in agriculture, complemented by 23% (21% and 24%) in the secondary and 20% (18% and 21%) in the tertiary sector. The fact that, of the latter, some 16% and 25% worked temporarily outside the village or the county, respectively, suggests that most secondary and tertiary sector was accessed through migration with village enterprises having very limited employment effects. Labor allocation across sectors changed over time: agriculture’s share declined to 52% (56% and 49% inside and outside the boundary, respectively) in the 2010-13 period, accompanied by an increase of work in secondary and tertiary sectors to 26% (23% and 28%) and 22% (20% and 23%), respectively. The share of workers working outside the county increased from 25% to 29% and that of those who left their village for a period of less than 6 months from 16% to 19%.

Of villages’ total land endowment, some 47% (44% vs. 50% outside and inside the border, respectively) was used for arable agriculture, 32% (38% vs. 28%) for ‘other’ agriculture, mostly pastures, 10% (8% vs. 11%) for residential or commercial purposes, and 11% (10% vs. 12%) remained unutilized. At 1.4 mu per capita, arable land endowments did not differ significantly between villages in- and outside the border. Residential land per capita was, with about 109 m<sup>2</sup> (101 m<sup>2</sup> outside and 115 m<sup>2</sup> inside). well above the 2030 m<sup>2</sup> norm for Sichuan (Han and Li 2009). Although more rigorous econometric analysis will be needed to assess whether these are true reform effects, we note that, in the post-reform period, the share of arable land increased inside but decreased outside the border while the opposite was observed for residential land. This is supported by an increase of almost 10 percentage points (from 1.40 to 1.53) in per capita arable land and an equivalent decrease (from 115 to 103 m<sup>2</sup> ) inside Chengdu prefecture, compared to unchanged levels of arable land and significant increases in residential land endowments outside the boundary.

The incidence of land reallocation and expropriation was low: they were observed in 5% and 2% of villages overall, with higher rates inside (7.3% and 2.4%, respectively) vs. outside (2.5% and 0.7%) the boundary although reallocations in control villages involved larger areas and numbers of households. Interestingly, 9