“華師經英Seminar”第十七期
題目：Political Turnovers, Career Concerns and the Environmental Performance: Evidence from Local Officials in China
時間：2020年7月9日（周四）14:00
地點：騰訊會議（會議 ID：720 291 362；會議密碼：226091）
主講人：吳明琴
主講人簡介：
吳明琴，新葡的京集團350vip8888經濟與管理學院教授。研究方向集中在發展經濟學和區域經濟學，目前主持國家自然科學基金等項目。
摘要: Does it pay to be “greener” as a local official in China? All else equal, does less pollution increase the chances of promotion for Chinese local leaders? In this paper, we examine the effect of local environment regulation outcomes, i.e., local pollution, on county leaders’ chances of promotion. This is an important question because only when the Chinese cadre evaluation system rewards local officials’ green behaviors, these officials would move away from their past priority in promoting economic growth at all costs, so that the environmental crisis in China might be addressed. We collect county party secretary data for over 2000 Chinese counties between 2001 and 2014 to measure their promotion patterns. We construct county-year SO2 and PM2.5 air pollution measures using fine-grained NASA satellite data. Importantly, we take advantage of a significant national policy change – the implementation of the 11th Five-Year Plan, starting in 2006 – which for the first time added environmental performance as an indicator for local officials’ promotion evaluation. Our empirical analysis shows that for county party secretaries, those who were able to reduce air pollution more than their predecessors and peers are much more likely to be promoted. Moreover, we only observe this “rewarding” effect of air pollution reduction after the implementation of the 11th Five-Year Plan.