【主讲】吴建峰 (复旦大学经济学院，副教授)
【主题】The costs of political favoritism: Evidence from placement of industrial parks across Chinese cities (Matthew Kahn, Weizeng Sun, Jianfeng Wu, Siqi Zheng)
【时间】2018年5月8日 (周二) 10：30-12：00
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼701室
【语言】英文
【摘要】This paper studies how political favoritism affects the placement of industrial park investments and their ex-post economic performance across cities in China. Using a unique dataset of local politicians during the time period of 1987-2008 we measure political connection between city-level top officials and their corresponding province-level key leaders. Exploiting within-official variation in connection due to the exogenous turnover of upper-level government leaders, we provide the evidence of the effect of political favoritism on investment allocation as a local official is found to be more likely to win an industrial park for the serving city after he is being politically connected. We further group city-year samples into different cells with the same probability in receiving industrial park investments using both parametric and nonparametric approaches. By comparing within-cell difference in economic performance between the politically-allocated industrial parks and those which placements are not driven by connectedness, we find that political favoritism leads to the misallocation of investment resources.
