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This paper demonstrates that a significant fraction of county-level income differences in China is due to differences in property rights institutions.This paper studies the effect of property rights institutions on economic performance by exploiting the effect of the opening of treaty ports from 1842 to 1948 in China.The opening of treaty ports leads to very different property rights institutions across counties in China.Counties with easy access to treaty ports develop better property rights institutions;for counties far away from treaty ports, the property rights institutions are relatively poor.This diver gent institutional pattern persists until today.Exploiting the effect of treaty ports system,this paper provides evidence that better property rights institutions could lead to better economic performance.Moreover, the estimated effect of property rights institutions on economic performance is insensitive to Buddhism belief, minority ratio and average ed ucation level.