This paper estimates the returns to membership of the Chinese Communist Party using unique twins data we collected from … China. Our OLS estimate shows that being a Party member increases earnings by 10%, but the within-twin-pair estimate becomes … zero. One interpretation of these results is that the OLS Party premium is due to omitted ability and family background …

We study the effect of former Communist party membership on paying bribes to public officials and motivations for …-socialist countries in 2015/16. To deal with endogeneity, we instrument party membership with information on whether family members were … affected by the Second World War. Instrumental variable results suggest that links to the former Communist party increase the …