Is the Bureaucracy Still Attractive? The Role of China’s Anti-Corruption Campaign in Reshaping Occupational Preference

Economic theory suggests that relative payoff scheme in a society might govern the allocation of talent to productive and unproductive activities. This paper provides empirical evidence by showing how China's recent anti-corruption campaign reshapes people's preference for bureaucratic jobs by affecting the relative payoff scheme. Employing the National Civil Service Exams data from 2012 to 2017 and using central inspections as quasi-natural experiments, our results, based on a difference-in-differences analysis, suggest that the campaign against corruption discourages people from applying for bureaucratic positions. The estimates are robust to several checks. We also carefully examined three underlying mechanisms behind the decline in applicants, which are income, privilege, and uncertainty. We found that the decrease is driven by the increasing political uncertainty, while the effects of income and privilege are not remarkable