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Abstract This article reviews recent developments in the theory of committee decision‐making. A committee consists of self‐interested members who make a public decision by aggregating imperfect information dispersed among them according to a pre‐specified decision rule. We focus on costly information acquisition, strategic information aggregation, and rules and processes that enhance the quality of the committee decision. Seeming inefficiencies of the committee decision‐making process such as over‐cautiousness, voting, and delay emerge as partial remedies to these incentive problems.

Previous research on regional environmental pollution acknowledge that cross-level government cooperation plays an important role in controlling regional environmental pollution. However, the balance between local fiscal autonomy and governance costs has received little attention. To fill this research gap, this paper argues a model of local fiscal autonomy moderating the efficiency of environmental governance, which provides a basis for studying the effect of local fiscal autonomy on intergovernmental cooperative environmental governance. We collected the data set of the China Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration, using Tobit regression model to evaluate the effect of local fiscal autonomy on cooperative arrangements and the moderating effect. The results show that higher local fiscal autonomy will positively affect vertical intervention actions and improve the efficiency of environmental governance. In addition, we found that more special funding for environmental projects will weaken the performance of horizontal cooperation on regional environmental governance.

AbstractIt is widely believed that the rotation and promotion system of local political chiefs plays an important role in China's economic miracle. In this paper, however, we focus on the potential cost of the inherent frequent turnover of local chiefs. Based on a new manually collected dataset on prefectural‐level local chiefs between 1983 and 2012, our empirical results suggest that the turnover of the local Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chief would lead to a 0.48 percentage point decrease in the local GDP growth rate in the current year. This effect is especially concentrated on more government‐affected fields, such as domestic investments, consumption and government expenditures. We also provide evidence that organization friction, especially the successor CCP chiefs' unfamiliarity with the city, his/her new colleagues and/or the working conditions, is one of the major potential reasons for such a negative turnover effect.