We document public-sector window dressing behavior in China’s Compulsory Education Promotion Program during the 1990s. Window-dressing behavior has been well-documented in various organizations when an agent faces high-stakes incentives.
How do public pension schemes reshape eldercare and social norms with son preference? Using variations in the timing of the New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) across rural Chinese counties..
We explore the impact of wage offers on job applications, testing implications of the directed search model and trying to distinguish it from random search. We use a field experiment conducted on an online Chinese job board, with real jobs for which we randomly varied the wage offers across three ranges. We find that higher wage offers raise application rates overall, which is consistent with directed search...
To improve capital allocative efficiency, starting in 2010, Chinese regulators switched from using return on equity to economic value added (EVA).
Exploiting individual-level data linking worker performance and stock investment, we show that a 10% increase in stock investment returns is associated with a decrease in the same investor’s work output by 3.8% in the following month.