Collaborative Research: Career Success in Government Bureaucracy: Evidence from Individual-Level Data

Project Outcomes Statement

In this project, we studied the selection and behavior of high-level Chinese bureaucrats. There are two studies that have thus far been published as a result of this research. The main project examines the role of social ties in the selection of China’s Politburo, the country’s highest decision-making body. We document a surprising and counter-intuitive result – that connections to incumbent politburo members via shared hometown or college are negative predictors of bureaucrats being selected to the politburo themselves. This penalty, we argue, is a combination of competition within “factions” from, for example, the same hometown (such that incumbent politburo members do not wish to see other faction members also gain power), and also the result of efforts to maintain the appearance of a strong stance against favoritism (an issue that was of great concern to Mao). This work has been published in the American Economic Review, the flagship journal of the economics profession.

In a second study that emerged from our project examines how social ties (as captured by shared hometown) between provincial auditors and city-level leaders impact the outcomes of municipal audits. Here, we find that social ties leads to fewer findings of questionable expenditures, a result that we argue is most plausibly the result of leniency of socially-connected auditors. These findings have been published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, a top general interest journal.

Finally, we have completed several further studies that are still in the process of being revised and submitted to journals. These include an analysis of gender and corruption, and also a study of how China’s anticorruption crackdown affected the career decisions of students at an elite Beijing university, in particular the decision of whether to pursue a career in public service.