These essays explore sources of inefficiency and mismeasurement, as well as possible routes for improvement via policy, in China’s coal power market and manufacturing sector. In the first chapter I develop a new model to quantify the behavior of market planners in China’s coal power sector as well as how this behavior affects the investment decisions of power plants. Chapter 2 compares different approaches to measuring and diagnosing the possible sources of inefficiency in China’s coal power market. Chapter 3 takes a broader look at the manufacturing sector in China to examine how differential treatment of state-owned enterprises should be accounted for in estimates of aggregate productivity for China.