Social Ties and the Selection of China’s Political Elite

Abstract

We study how sharing a hometown or college connection with an incumbent member of China’s Politburo affects a candidate’s likelihood of selection as a new member. In specifications that include fixed effects to absorb quality differences across cities and colleges, we find that hometown and college connections are each associated with 5–9 percentage point reductions in selection probability. This “connections penalty” is equally strong for retiring Politburo members, arguing against quota-based explanations, and it is much stronger for junior Politburo members, consistent with a role for intra-factional competition. Our findings differ from earlier work because of our emphasis on within-group variation, and our focus on shared hometown and college, rather than shared workplace, connections. (JEL D72, O17, P26, Z13)

The Political Economy of Multilateral Lending to European Regions

“…First, we study a sub-sample of Directors who change their work region during or after their service at the EIB. While sending money to their pre-EIB regions can be a mix of the information and favoritism channels, we show weak evidence that the resources are 4 One exception in the literature documenting positive effects of home-bias in various outcomes is Fisman et al (2019) who shows that bureaucrats sharing a hometown or college connection with an incumbent member of the Chinese Politburo are actually penalized in their probability to be promoted to the Politburo. sent to the post-EIB regions during the end of the Board membership, which is likely to be due to favoritism assuming that the Directors cannot have a priori information about the new region.…”

Rural E-commerce development and farmers’ digital credit behavior: Evidence from China family panel studies

“…Considering the possible endogeneity problem caused by omitted variables, the instrumental variables are chosen to try to solve the potential endogeneity problem, which must be at least positively correlated with farmers' participation in e-commerce behavior and not significantly correlated with farmers' access to digital credit support, i.e., consistent with homogeneity. Specifically, the instrumental Variable is based on the prefectural and municipal mayors database in the People's Republic of China (2017-2020), referring to [53]. However, since e-commerce is only classified as economic work in the job arrangement of mayors, whether the head of the prefecture-level administrative region (mayor) has an education background in economics and whether they have work experience in e-commerce are selected as instrumental variables for farmers' participation in e-commerce behavior.…”

Environmental Regulations, Political Incentives and Local Economic Activities: Evidence from China*

“…In addition to age, professional connections are regarded as significant complements or substitutions to economic performance in determining an official's chances of promotion (Jia, Kudamatsu and Seim, 2015; Fisman et al ., 2020). Normally, researchers identify officials as connected if they come from the same hometown or the same school or if they have ever worked in the same place.…”