📄 Ongoing Projects

• Obedience with Risks: Patronage Networks under Authoritarian Bureaucracy **
  • Abstract: Authoritarian regimes are often criticized for being riddled with graft and corruption, and even in those so-called modern autocracies of “enlightened despotism” that promote meritocracy and elitism, the corruption level in local governments remain staggering. This article attempts to construct a series of simplified tripartite game models, i.e., a three-layer principal-agent structure including the central government, provincial leaders, and local subordinates, to explain how an authoritarian government that lacks external democratic oversight and is maintained only by the elite central government leads to the inevitable problem of corruption. The article finds that the Anti-corruption Campaign and effective monitoring by the central government can act as a deterrent to provincial officials, thus altering the strategies of local subordinates, and ultimately eliminating collusions and local patronage networks. However, the paper also reveals the flaws of this top-down authoritarian bureaucratic model: if the central government, as the sole regulatory force, fails to maintain a high-intensity monitoring on local officials, the deterrent effect on corruption would then be drastically reduced, leading to massive governance failures.
  • This research is a further survey on patronage networks in China by modeling the principal-client interactions as a signaling game, based on empirical results from Patronage Networks and Local Governance in China: Historical Legacy and Empirical Evidence.
• Migration After Flood and Compounding Hazard: Evidence from Hurricane Matthew Coauthor: Gregory Campbell Jr., Chengxi Su, Rongze Yang (Duke Economics) Supervisor: Prof. Christopher Timmins (Duke Economics), Kay Jowers (Nicholas Institute)
  • Abstract: In this paper, we use InfoUSA data from 2015 and 2017 and flood maps of Hurricane Matthew to analyze the impact of flood hazards on changes in households of different socioeconomic status using probit models. Two main questions are answered: who lived in the flooded area and who moved away after floods. We find after controlling for high-value properties in coastal areas, high-income communities are less likely to live in flooded areas and more likely to move away from those zones. We also find heterogeneous effects of floods on different racial groups. African American households tend to live in flooded areas and they are less likely to relocate, indicating a severe environmental injustice occurring to vulnerable communities.

📜 Course Papers

• Corruption, Information Concealment and Local Inequality POLSCI 745 Core in PE, 2021 | Course instructor: Prof. Daniel Stegmueller
  • Abstract: This paper verifies the information concealing effect of corruption. Using data from environmental complaints from China, we find that corruption significantly reduces the number of environmental complaints disclosed by local governments, and that this effect is transmitted in part by reducing the local governments’ transparency. In addition, FDI increases local environmental complaints, which we attribute to the fact that FDI improves local governments’ transparency rather than causing more pollution. Evidence also supports Barreto’s theory (2000) and Alesina and Angeletos’ hypothesis (2005) that corruption increases local redistribution and reduces income inequality.
• Patronage Networks and Local Governance in China: Historical Legacy and Empirical Evidence ECON 751 PE of Institutions, 2020 | Course instructor: Prof. Timur Kuran
  • Abstract: This article examines the impact of patron-client relations on local governance in the contemporary China. We use the connection between city leaders and the provincial secretary to represent the patron-client relation (Jiang, 2018) and explore its impact on the local government’s ruling power and transparency. The article finds that although the network could promote local economic growth, it remains personal-interest-centered and short-sighted, condoning the complicity between officials and polluting enterprises, acting as a detriment to local sustainable development and aggregate social welfare.
• Fiscal Subsidies and Credit Support: How Corporate Green Innovation Attracts Institutional Investors Bachelor’s Dissertation, 2020
  • Abstract: Based on the corporate patents of Chinese listed companies from 2003 to 2015, this paper studies whether corporate green innovation could attract institutional investors, and the possible mechanisms of mediation. We find that institutional investors tend to be attracted by the firms’ green innovation performance, and are more willing to invest in non-SOEs and firms in non-heavy-polluting industries. Furthermore, compared with the banking support, only the fiscal subsidies plays a significant mediating effect, indicating that the impact is partly transmitted by reducing its effective tax rate.