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...

A long intellectual tradition starting with Max Weber views an ideal bureaucracy as a completely rule-based system. However, the net effect of discretionary appointment compared with a rule-based approach is theoretically ambiguous. Exploiting a unique setting in China’s imperial bureaucracy,...

This article is a first attempt to investigate Chinese bureaucratic politics in-depth in order to analyze how these dynamics affect the outcome of antitrust enforcement in China. It has two major findings. First, bureaucratic politics have a powerful impact on the allocation of economic...

How does one build a centralized bureaucratic state? A dominant view is that wars incentivize rulers to directly extract resources, thereby increasing state capacity. The Chinese empire, one of the earliest states to develop a centralized bureaucracy, can provide useful insights. Using...

There is a clear and persistent inequality of bureaucratic employment between individuals with a bureaucrat parent and those without. Using the recent anti-corruption campaign in China as a quasi-experiment, we investigate how endeavors for counter-corruption affect inequality and potential...

There is a clear and persistent inequality of bureaucratic employment between individuals with a bureaucrat parent and those without. Using the recent anti-corruption campaign in China as a quasi-experiment, we investigate how endeavors for counter-corruption affect inequality and potential...

This paper studies the role of bureaucracy in determining China's fiscal picture through the lens of local government debt. By empirically examining the causality between politicians' profile and budgeting, I unveil some opportunistic behaviors that stem from age-based promotion incentives....

Subjective performance evaluation is widely used by firms and governments to provide work incentives. However, delegating evaluation power to local leadership could induce influence activities: employees might devote too much effort to impressing/pleasing their evaluator, relative to working...

One puzzle that haunts comparative politics scholars is the variation in the intensity of state coercion in authoritarian regimes. Why are some bureaucrats more heavy-handed in their use of force than others? In this paper, we propose a novel theory to explain the unevenness of bureaucratic...

There is a clear and persistent inequality of bureaucratic employment between individuals with a bureaucrat parent and those without. Using the recent anti-corruption campaign in China as a quasi-experiment, we investigate how endeavors for counter-corruption affect inequality and potential...