Suchergebnisse

It has been well recognized that power distribution plays an important role in economic development. In my research field, political economy, an influential literature emphasizes that political power distribution affects resource allocation, economic production, and consequently the fortunes of a country or a nation (e.g., North 1990, Acemoglu and Robinson 2012 among many others). In contrast, researchers have paid relatively less attention to the impact of power in academia, perhaps believing that in this context, resource allocation should be driven primarily by academic merit. In power-oriented societies, however, academia may not be immune to the influence of power. Analogous to how political power affects economic production, administrative power in academia influences scientific production. This is the point my coauthors and I illustrate in the case of Chinese academia.

Complementary Roles of Connections and Performance in Political Selection in China Who becomes a top politician in China? We focus on provincial leaders and examine how their chance of being promoted depends on performance and connections with top politicians. We find a positive correlation between promotion and growth that is robustly stronger for connected provincial leaders than for unconnected ones. Pollution for Promotion This paper provides evidence on the impact of political incentives on the environment using the case of China's pollution. Guided by a simple career concerns model with the choice of dirty and clean technologies, I examine empirically how promotion incentives of provincial governors affect pollution and find that stronger career concerns increase pollution. Decentralization, Collusion and Coalmine Deaths This paper investigates how collusion between regulators and firms affects workplace safety using the case of China's coalmine deaths. We find that decentralization increases coalmine death because collusion is easier under decentralization. We also find that this increase in mortality is larger for the regulators with lower transaction costs. The Legacies of Forced Freedom: China's Treaty Ports This paper investigates the long-run development of China's treaty ports from the mid-18th century until today. I document the dynamic development paths of treaty ports and their neighbours in alternate phases of closedness and openness. I also provide suggestive evidence to understand the advantage of treaty ports in the long run. Weather Shocks, Sweet Potatoes and Peasant Revolts in Historical China I use data covering 267 prefectures over four centuries to investigate how weather shocks and the introduction of a drought-resistant crop affected peasant revolts. I find that droughts increased the likelihood of peasant revolts and the effect of droughts got mitigated by the adoption of sweet potatoes.

Abstract
This paper studies the impact of air pollution spillover from China to South Korea. To isolate the effects of cross-border pollution spillover from that of locally generated pollution, we exploit within-South Korea and over-time variation in the incidence of Asian dust—a meteorological phenomenon exogenous to district–time cells in South Korea—together with temporal variations in China's air quality. We find that conditional on being exposed to Asian dust, increased pollution in China leads to increased mortality from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases in South Korean districts, with the most vulnerable being the elderly and children under five.