Publications:

"Do College Graduates Serving as Village Officials Help Rural China?" (with Guojun He)
​American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2017, 9(4), pp 186-215.
  • Abstract: This study estimates the effect of improved bureaucrat quality on poverty alleviation by exploring a unique human capital reallocation policy in China – the “College Graduate Village Officials” (CGVOs) program. We find that introducing CGVOs into the village governance system improves the targeting and implementation of the central government’s social assistance programs. CGVOs help eligible poor households understand and apply for relevant subsidies, thus increasing the number of pro-poor program beneficiaries. Further analysis suggests that CGVOs improve the quality rather than the quantity of village bureaucrats, and their presence reduces elite capture of pro-poor programs.
  • Award: Gregory Chow Best Paper Award, Chinese Economists Society, 2015
  • Media Coverage: AEA Research Highlight; Financial Times (Chinese); CNPolitics (Chinese).


​Working Papers:

​"Leveraging Political Incentives for Environmental Regulation: Evidence from Chinese Manufacturing Firms" (with Guojun He and Bing Zhang; 2018) Revise and resubmit, Quarterly Journal of Economics
  • ​Abstract: This paper estimates the effect of environmental regulation on firm productivity using a spatial regression discontinuity design implicit in China’s water quality monitoring system. Because water quality readings are important for political evaluations, and the monitoring stations only capture emissions from their upstream regions, local government officials are incentivized to enforce tighter environmental standards on firms immediately upstream of a monitoring station, rather than those immediately downstream. Exploiting this discontinuity in regulation stringency with novel firm-level geocoded emission and production datasets, we find that upstream polluting firms face a 27% reduction in Total Factor Productivity (TFP), and a 48% reduction in emission intensity, as compared to their downstream counterparts. We find that the discontinuity in TFP does not exist in non-polluting industries, only emerged after the government explicitly linked political promotion to water quality readings, and was entirely driven by prefecture cities with career-driven leaders. Linking the TFP estimate with the emission estimate, a back of the envelope calculation indicates that China’s current water-pollution abatement target leads to an annual economic loss of more than 30 billion dollars.
  • Award: Gregory Chow Best Paper Award, Chinese Economists Society, 2018
​
"Influence Activities and Bureaucratic Performance: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment in China" (with Alain de Janvry, Elisabeth Sadoulet, Guojun He, and Qiong Zhang; 2019)
  • Abstract: Subjective performance evaluation is widely used by firms and governments to provide work incentives. However, delegating evaluation power to senior leadership could cause influence activities: agents might devote much efforts to please their supervisors, rather than focusing on productive tasks that benefit their organizations. We conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment among Chinese grassroots state employees and provide the first rigorous empirical evidence on the existence and implications of influence activities. We find that state employees are able to impose supervisor-specific influence to affect evaluation outcomes, and this process could be partly observed by their co-workers. Furthermore, introducing uncertainty in the identity of the evaluator, which discourages supervisor-specific influence activities, can significantly improve the work performance of state employees.

"Religion and Motivated Cognition: When Ramadan Meets the College Entrance Exam" (with Ao Wang and Xiaoyang Ye; 2018)​​ 
  • Abstract: This paper reports a field experiment showing that motivated cognition makes people fail to learn from important objective information. We focus on a unique empirical setting, where Chinese Muslim students were about to take the high-stakes College Entrance Exam (CEE) during the month of Ramadan, due to the occasional overlap of these two events. We invited well-respected Chinese Muslim leaders to grant explicit exemptions to delay the Ramadan fast until after the exam, which we randomly provided to some Muslim students, creating experimental variation in the stringency of religious practices. We then showed all Muslim students the same information on the cost of taking the CEE during Ramadan (in terms of exam score loss), which we obtained from a novel administrative dataset. We find that when students did not receive the exemption, they exhibited strong patterns of motivated cognition by underestimating the cost of fasting on exam performance; for those who received the exemption, such bias in learning was alleviated, which also made them more willing to delay the fast for the CEE. Our results provide new evidence on how people can distort valuable objective information and under-appreciate the cost of religious activities.
​
"Fiscal Competition and Coordination: Evidence from China" (2016, new version coming soon)  
  • ​Abstract: This paper intends to provide causal evidence on fiscal competition and coordination between local governments. We first introduce a unique empirical setting created by the combination of two national programs in China, the “Rural School Consolidation (RSC)” program and the “Special Economic Zones (SEZs)” program, in which spatially adjacent townships have discontinuous incentives to either compete or coordinate with a neighboring SEZ. Exploiting such quasi-experimental variation with a spatial-discontinuity design, we find a series of empirical evidence on the existence of competition and coordination between local governments, which can be formally rationalized by a simple model where asymmetric jurisdictions compete for mobile labor. Our results suggest that the strategic interactions among local governments play important roles in public goods provision and labor migration: during the RSC program (2001-2011), townships that coordinate with their neighboring SEZs closed an extra 15% of local primary schools, and lost an extra 7% of local population, as compared to townships that compete with their neighboring SEZs.
  • Award: Sidney Hoos Award for Best Second Year Paper, UC Berkeley ARE, 2016

"Buddha's Grace Illuminates All: Temple Destruction, School Construction, and Modernization in 20th Century China" (with Boxiao Zhang; 2016) 
  • Abstract: This study describes a novel natural experiment in early 20th century China known as the “Temple Destruction Movement” (TDM), where local governments were required to take over the assets of Buddhist and Taoist temples to support the modernization of local schooling. We show that before the TDM, the initial stock of average temple assets was not correlated with various measures of human capital and economic development; while after the TDM started, regions with higher initial stocks of average temple assets constructed more schools, enrolled more students, produced more modern elites, and experienced faster economic development. Moreover, we find that the impacts of the TDM have persisted into the 21st century: regions with higher initial stocks of average temple assets before the TDM still had higher levels of human capital and better economic performance in 2000. We also find suggestive evidence that temples affected both mid-run and long-run development mainly through the channel that the TDM boosted local human capital accumulation.


​Selected Works in Progress:

"The Environmental, Economic, and Welfare Consequences of Internalizing Border Spillovers" (with Zenan Wang) Incomplete draft available upon request

"Citizen Participation and Government Accountability: Experimental Evidence from Environmental Appeals in China" (with Mark Buntine, Michael Greenstone, Guojun He, Mengdi Liu, and Bing Zhang)

"Marginal Abatement Cost and Optimal Regulation Stringency: Evidence from the 'Double-Randomized Emissions Auditing' Program in China" (with Guojun He and Bing Zhang)

"The Selection and Making of Civil Servants: Evidence from China's College Graduate Civil Services Program" (with Guojun He, David Y. Yang, and Qiong Zhang)

"Improving Social Mobility by Helping Rural Students Make Informed College Choices" (with Ao Wang and Xiaoyang Ye)

"Justice and Economic Development" (with Wenwei Peng)


Other Writings:

"Capturing the Transformation Rent: Lessons from Mexico and China" with Alain de Janvry, Policy Brief Ferdi B112, July 2015.

"How Does the Auction of License Plates Affect the Trade of Auto in Shanghai?" Statistical Research (in Chinese), with Boxiao Zhang, V30(3): 78-85, 2013.

"Why Have Some Local Governments Closed More Rural Schools than Others?​" with Yanqing Ding and Xiaoyang Ye, China Economics of Education Review (in Chinese), 2016, 1(4): 3-34.