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Improving State Effectiveness by Discouraging Civil Servants from Flattering Their Leaders

Alain de Janvry, Guojun He, Elisabeth Sadoulet, Shaoda Wang, Qiong Zhang, Mar 11, 2020

Evaluation of public employees performance is essential to induce higher work efforts. We use an experiment in two provinces of china to explore how to design such evaluation. Results show that the incentive effect of evaluation can be larger if the employee does not know ex-ante who the evaluator will be, thus reducing attempts at personally influencing the evaluator and enhancing instead job achievements.

Finance Leases: A Hidden Channel of China’s Shadow Banking System

Jinfan Zhang, Ting Yang, Yanping Shi, Nov 11, 2020

We find that banks use their affiliated leasing firms to provide credit to constrained clients in order to circumvent the government’s targeted monetary tightening policy, which offsets the expected decline in traditional bank loans in overcapacity industries and hampers the effectiveness of the monetary policy. Although this regulatory arbitrage may cause systemic risk at the macro level, bank-affiliated leasing firms...

Understanding the Evolution of China’s Production and Trade Patterns

Hanwei Huang, Jiandong Ju, Vivian Yue, Oct 09, 2024

The article discusses how capital accumulation has driven China's transition towards capital-intensive industries, while labor-biased productivity growth has helped China maintain a competitive edge in labor-intensive sectors.

Brain Drain to the State Sector: Job Preferences and Outcomes for China’s College Graduates

Hongbin Li, Lingsheng Meng, Yanyan Xiong, Sinclair Cook, Feb 28, 2024

Despite private enterprises dominating China’s labor market, college-educated workers are still highly concentrated in the state sector. Using data from the Chinese College Student Survey, we find that 64% of students in the sample expressed a strong preference for state-sector employment.

From Fog to Smog: The Value of Pollution Information

Panle Jia Barwick, Shanjun Li, Liguo Lin, Eric Zou, Feb 05, 2020

During 2013–2014, China launched a nation-wide real-time air quality monitoring and disclosure program, which was a watershed moment in the history of its environmental regulations. We present the first empirical analysis of this natural experiment by exploiting its staggered introduction across cities. The program substantially expanded public access to pollution information, and in turn, triggered a cascade...