Browsing by Author "Malesky, Edmund J"
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Item Open Access A Decentralized Iron Cage: Do Chinese Local Officials Comply with the Central Government?(2016) Ge, HaosenThis paper contributes to the literature in nancial aid and authoritarian institutions.
For a long time, scholars are debating whether nancial aid is able to facilitate
development and governance. Though abundant evidence is provided, the answer is
still inconclusive. On the other hand, scholars investigating China argue that the
leadership uses various institutions to ensure local ocials' compliance. In this paper,
we nd that the nancial aid does not bring a positive impact and the central
government in China does not have enough monitoring capacity to force local o-
cials to comply. We study a redevelopment program established by Chinese central
government after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. By adopting a geographic regression
discontinuity combining with a dierence-in-dierences design, we show that
the redevelopment program does not signicantly develop the disaster area. On the
contrary, the evidence implies that the economy in the disaster area is worse after
receiving the aid. The results imply that local ocials do not follow the central government's
regulations and misuse the aid money for other purposes. In the future, we
expect to further investigate through which mechanism do local ocials undermine
the existing institutions.
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Item Open Access "All of My Business": Governmental Social Media and Authoritarian Responsiveness(2017) Liu, ChuanHow would authoritarian regimes react to the emergence of social media compared to traditional media? What role(s) would media play in authoritarianism? This study focuses on China, the largest existing authoritarian regime, to answer the questions above. A formal model first indicates that entering the era of social media would be a challenge for dictators if they still regard social media as a tool for propaganda as traditional media; instead, they would choose other strategies in response to the challenge. The content analysis between Weibo (Chinese Twitter) and People's Daily in China confirms that traditional media and social media serve as different tools: The former are still tools for propaganda, whereas the latter show more responsiveness, especially about the public's daily life, even though this is none of the government's business. This results may indicate a new way by which authoritarian regimes maintain the rule making use of media.
Item Open Access Assessing China’s Economic and Political Power Play(2022) Wang, YuelinHow effectively has China utilized its economic power to gain political support worldwide? This paper aims to answer this question, which is vital to understanding the new dynamics of the international order, through a more appropriate quantitative analysis. To this end, it first discusses why the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Voting Data, which is commonly used to measure a country's foreign policy alignment, is a relatively ineffective method. Thereafter, it proposes a new set of measurements that better represent China's core political intentions under its overseas economic efforts: other countries' support for China's sovereign standing and China-built new international institutions. I also argue that different types of economic interactions may influence other countries' political support for China in varying patterns. By creating novel datasets to measure other countries' alignment with China on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), I find that China has partly translated its economic power into its global political influence with different mechanisms. First, countries that receive more aid from China are more inclined to align with China's sovereign standings. Second, countries that trade more with China are more likely to show explicit political support for China-built new institutions. These findings advance our understanding of China's economic power and the complex interaction between global politics and economy.
Item Open Access Behavioral Traits and Political Selection in Authoritarian Ruling Parties: Evidence from the Chinese Communist Party(2018) Lu, FengmingThis dissertation investigates the role of behavioral factors in the personnel selection in authoritarian ruling parties. First, I argue that authoritarian ruling parties increase the weight of dispositional and behavioral criteria in personnel selection as a response to structural changes. Namely, the reasons behind this shift are that an authoritarian ruling party faces similar problems in personnel selection (such as heterogeneities in agents’ tasks and the multitask problem) and the party can no longer observe members’ and cadres’ loyalty based on a single indicator. Subsequently, I argue that risk attitudes, a key dispositional concept in applied psychology and behavioral politics, explain cadres’ propensities to engage in policy innovation and their obedience to the party leadership's authority and orders. I further examine two mechanisms that might explain the relationship between risk attitudes and obedience, namely sensation-seeking and loss aversion. Finally, I contend that authoritarian ruling parties employ a diversified strategy of personnel selection when they assign cadres to different offices. To test the arguments, the author employs a mixed-method approach and utilizes archival evidence, original cadre survey experiments, original survey data, and interviews in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the largest authoritarian ruling party in the world.
Item Open Access Belief Updating in a Biased Information Environment: Evidence From Hierarchical Government Satisfaction in Vietnam(2020) Song, YangPeople tend to hold more positive attitude to central government relative to local governments in east Asian single-party regimes. Drawing from political psychology literature, I argue the information environment biased against local governments shaped people’s political attitude, and ultimately contributed to this hierarchical structure of governmental satisfaction. By exploiting a quasi-exogenous variation of intensity of censorship in rural Vietnam, this article shows that an information environment more biased against local governments may lead to a larger difference in satisfaction to central relative to local governments. It is also displayed that people with higher-level of education are more susceptible to this biased information environment.
Item Open Access Brain Drain or Gain? Skilled Migration and Human Capital Accumulation in the Developing World(2019) Do, Trang AnhDeveloping countries have long worried about the prospects of their “best and brightest” moving to the developed world. Some scholars have argued that massive emigration of highly-educated labor deprives these countries of much-needed human capital, leaving them “forever destitute.” However, other scholars have questioned this argument, pointing out that high wages in migrant-receiving countries can serve as an incentive for potential migrants to invest more in human capital than they would otherwise. Some of these high-skilled workers will end up staying, raising the overall level of human capital in developing countries. This phenomenon is referred to as “brain gain.” One key underlying assumption of existing brain gain models is that migrant-receiving countries cannot distinguish high-skilled workers from low-skilled workers when deciding whether to grant them entry. This dissertation argues that while this assumption may have been valid in the past, it no longer reflects today’s world where high-income countries have developed a rigorous screening process and select only the best qualified immigrants. Thus, we need a new theoretical framework to reflect this new reality. Building a model of brain gain based on the “tournament model” introduced by Lazear and Rosen (1979), this dissertation shows that the wage difference between migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries is the main motivation for potential migrants to acquire more education and compete for higher paying jobs in migrant-receiving countries. This dissertation argues that two key factors determining this income gap are 1) the intensity of screening by migrant-receiving countries and 2) the wage level in migrant-sending countries. Utilizing two exogenous shocks including an increase in screening by the United States following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and a series of affirmative action policies implemented in Malaysia, the dissertation finds that the intensity of screening by migrant-receiving countries has a positive effect on human capital accumulation in migrant-sending countries and a decrease in the wage level in migrant-sending countries has a positive impact on the educational outcomes of potential migrants.
Item Embargo Building Coercive Capacity: Three Essays(2023) Saijo, HarunobuThis thesis is comprised of three chapters on different challenges state-builders face when creating an effective state apparatus. When principals (such as authoritarian leaders or elected representatives) set up security organs, they must make officials in the security services overcome collective action problems to maintain security. However, the achieved cooperation can also undermine state security by generating the potential for agency problems such as collusion and treason. Thus, leaders must balance their efforts to empower collective action among security officials while managing this principal-agent problem and undermining adverse collective action. The chapter "Fending Off Shield and Sword: How Strategic Purges of State Security Personnel Protect Dictators" focuses on the strategic use of purges by leaders to undermine adverse collective action among officials. I test the theory that leaders purge according to factional ties to undermine collective action on the case of the Stalinist purges of the Soviet secret police using individual-level career data. Extant conflicts and social cleavages often shape how states expand power to the periphery. The chapter “How Settlement and Inter-Ethnic Conflict Over Property Rights Shapes State Capacity” focuses on Japanese-led state-building in Manchuria. I examine the strategies that states utilize in expanding state capacity through exploiting ethnic conflicts and cleavages between its subjects, finding that conflict can induce cooperation with state-building efforts from some groups but not others, due to different incentives arising from conflicting property rights institutions. I also address the trade-offs between deploying coercion and building infrastructural power, such as the adverse effects of repression on the state’s ability to administer and obtain information about its population. To highlight this tradeoff, my dissertation chapter titled “How Repression Undermines Infrastructural Power” shows that repression by police forces retards their ability to ascertain accurate information about the population. This relationship is tested by analyzing the legacies of arbitrary Chinese repressions against Korean settlers in warlord-era Manchuria. There is a strong relationship between anti-Korean repression and lower state capacity in the subsequent period, and police literacy data suggests this is partly driven by the inability to recruit quality candidates.
Item Open Access Diversity and Group Performance: Evidence from the World's Top Soccer League(2014) Ingersoll, Keith; Malesky, Edmund J; Saiegh, Sebastian MItem Open Access Does Economic Growth Reduce Corruption? Theory and Evidence from Vietnam(2013-10) Bai, Jie; Jayachandran, Seema; Malesky, Edmund J; Olken, Benjamin AItem Open Access Economic Returns to Deputy Status in Authoritarian Legislatures: Evidence from China(2015) Liu, ZhenIn explaining legislatures in authoritarian regimes, cooptation theory, selectorate theory, and literature on value of political connections and status suggest higher economic returns to legislators. Using survey data concerning Chinese individuals, this paper empirically explores the effect of legislative deputy status on personal income, and does not find the deputies to be better off than non-deputies. The results are qualitatively the same in a series of Heckman two-stage models and Propensity Score Matching methods. However, it might be too early to declare the failure of those theories in China, and this paper calls for cautious interpretation of the result.
Item Open Access Essays on the Political Economy of Authoritarian Rule(2020) Wen, TusiThis dissertation consists of three essays pertaining to the political economy of authoritarian rule. The first essay contributes a missing piece to the puzzle of the "Great Divergence" between Western Europe and East Asia by investigating the regularity of imperial cycles in East Asia. Combining game-theoretic arguments and historical analysis, it traces the region's authoritarian roots to structural asymmetries and the resulting millennial interactions between the nomadic and sedentary polities that give rise to bureaucratic empires in China. The second essay investigates the logic underlying revolutions and the consequences of authoritarian control. Through decision-theoretic models highlighting the micro-motives of revolutionary participation and the potentially nonlinear characteristics of revolutionary processes, it demonstrates the limitations and paradoxical effects of authoritarian control as manifested through its inter-temporal trade-offs, knowingly or unknowingly faced by an autocrat with bounded rationality and limited foresight. The third essay blends theories of international relations and comparative political economy by studying crisis bargaining under power asymmetry and connecting it to authoritarian politics. Framing intra-elite power-sharing and regional contentious politics under authoritarianism as crisis bargaining in a weak institutional environment, it reveals an overlooked mechanism through which the weak may offset power asymmetry in bargaining against the strong. This mechanism helps explain elite-led mass movements and within-regime variations of contentious politics under authoritarian rule.
Item Open Access Estimating the Preference of Countries and Multinational Corporations Using Two-Sided Matching Model(2018) Le, AnhA foreign direct investment (FDI) project can only materialize with the consent of both the multinational corporation (MNC) and the host country. However, the literature on FDI has focused only on the preference of MNCs, assuming that all countries are eager to receive FDI. Through various case studies, I show that countries have varied and strategic preference, playing a substantial role in determining where FDI locates. Failing to recognize this two-sided matching nature of the FDI market, not only do existing models of FDI produce wrong estimates of MNCs' preference, they also prevent us from investigating countries' preference. I introduce the two-sided matching model, investigate properties of the model, and apply it to study Japanese FDI in Southeast Asia. I show how to estimate the preference of both MNCs and countries for one another, modeling the two-sided matching process behind FDI location that scholars have always known but never been able to study quantitatively. With this model, scholars can better understand of what drives FDI location and policy makers can better simulate FDI movement under hypothetical policy changes.
Item Open Access FDI Perspectives: Issues in International Investment(2011-01-01) Sauvant, Karl P; Sachs, Lisa; Davies, Kenneth; Zandvliet, Ruben; Hufbauer, Gary Clyde; Kekic, Laza; Jensen, Nathan M; Malesky, Edmund J; Avi-Yonah, Reuven S; Guimon, Jose; Cotula, Lorenzo; Bellak, Christian; Leibrecht, Markus; Ozawa, Terutomo; Mortimore, Michael; Razo, Carlos; Satyanand, Premila Nazareth; Bruche, Gert; van Aaken, Anne; Kurtz, Jürgen; Gordon, Kathryn; Pohl, Joachim; Fotak, Veljko; Megginson, William L; Kovacs, Charles; Plotkin, Mark; Fagan, David N; Bhattacharjee, Subrata; de Mestral, Armand Claude; Yackee, Jason Webb; Gallagher, Kevin P; Skovgaard Poulsen, Lauge N; Franck, Susan; Smit, Hans; Nolan, Michael D; Sourgens, Frederic G; Peterson, Luke Eric; Van Harten, Gus; de Gramont, AlexandreItem Open Access FDI Perspectives: Issues in International Investment, 2nd Edition(2012) Sauvant, Karl P; Reimer, Jennifer; Allee, Todd; Alon, Ilan; Amsden, Alice H; Asami, Tadahiro; Avi-Yonah, Reuven S; Barbour, Paul; Bellak, Christian; Berger, Axel; Beugelsdijk, Sjoerd; Bhattacharjee, Subrata; Broadman, Harry G; Broomfield, Elizabeth; Bruche, Gert; Busse, Matthias; Cantwell, John A; Cherp, Aleh; Cotula, Lorenzo; Dasgupta, Nandita; Davies, Kenneth; de Gramont, Alexandre; de Mestral, Armand Claude; Duggal, Kabir; Economou, Persephone; Evans, John; Fagan, David N; Feldman, Mark; Ferré, Hermann; Firger, Daniel M; Fotak, Veljko; Franck, Susan D; Gallagher, Kevin P; Gokgur, Nilgun; Gordon, Kathryn; Guimon, Jose; Hanemann, Thilo; Harding, Torfinn; Hennart, Jean-François; Hirsch, Seev; Huo, Wing Xiaoying; Smarzynska Javorcik, Beata; Jensen, Nathan M; Johnson, Lise; Jost, Thomas; Kahale III, George; Kalotay, Kalman; Kekic, Laza; Kline, John M; Kovacs, Charles; Kurtz, Jürgen; Low, Jo En; Pérez Ludeña, Miguel; Malesky, Edmund J; McAllister, Geraldine; Megginson, William L; Meunier-Aitsahalia, Sophie; Mortimore, Michael; Moser, Joel; Nolan, Michael D; Nunnenkamp, Peter; Ozawa, Terutomo; Peinhardt, Clint; Perrone, Nicolás M; Peterson, Luke Eric; Plotkin, Mark; Pohl, Joachim; Skovgaard Poulsen, Lauge N; Razo, Carlos; Rosen, Daniel; Roy, Martin; Sacerdoti, Giorgio; Satyanand, Premila Nazareth; Schekulin, Manfred; Schill, Stephan; Sercovich, Francisco Colman; HL Slangen, Arjen; Smeets, Roger; Smit, Hans; Sornarajah, M; Sourgens, Frederic G; Strauss, Jonathan; Thomas, Kenneth P; Thomas, Margo; Toledano, Perrine; Topal, Julien; van Aaken, Anne; Van Harten, Gus; Villar, Daniel; Walker, Sandy; Wilkins, Mira; Yackee, Jason W; Zhao, ChenItem Open Access Heterogeneity and Group Performance: Evaluating the Effect of Cultural Diversity in the World's Top Soccer League(2013-12-01) Ingersoll, Keith; Malesky, Edmund J; Saiegh, Sebastian MItem Open Access How China Escaped the Poverty Trap.(PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICS, 2017-12-01) Malesky, Edmund JItem Open Access Institutionalized Rent Seeking: The Political-business Revolving Door in China(2021) Li, ZerenScholars contend that in a weak institutional context, firms enter the political marketplace primarily through bribery or entrepreneurs running for public office. My dissertation challenges this conventional understanding by arguing that revolving-door channels have become a prevalent means of rent-seeking when within-government career opportunities are rare for public officials and the private sector is profitable. This dissertation proposes a theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of revolving-door officials in authoritarian regimes and tests this framework through a rigorous inquiry of firms in China. The three papers that constitute this work analyze the pattern, formation, and economic outcome of hiring revolving-door officials. I show the distortionary impact of post-government career concerns on public resource allocation, a mixed revolving-door recruitment strategy adopted by firms seeking both political power and regulatory expertise, and the salient signaling effect of revolving-door connections on financial investors.
Item Open Access Judicial Transparency in China: Principal-Agent Problem and Firm Characteristics(2021) Wang, ZeyuanThe thesis discusses the principal-agent problem in authoritarian countries during the practice of judicial transparency. In specific, it studies what motivates Chinese courts to be partially obedient under mandatory disclosure policies, as opposed to strictly disclosing as instructed. I empirically test how ownership structure and political connections of firms affect courts’ final decisions in implementing transparency on intellectual property litigations. I create a case-level dataset from 2007 to 2017 by comparing the IP litigations claimed by listed firms and the litigation disclosure conducted by the local courts later. The empirical results suggest that local courts defend the interests of SOEs by not disclosing litigations involving these firms, but they do not give preferential treatment to politically connected firms alone. This study sheds light on the principal-agent problem in China’s judicial branch, and explains the incentives of the local courts in making their own decisions.
Item Open Access Multilevel Governance and Accountability: Does Decentralization Promote Good Governance?(2016) Jang, JinhyukToday, the trend towards decentralization is far-reaching. Proponents of decentralization have argued that decentralization promotes responsive and accountable local government by shortening the distance between local representatives and their constituency. However, in this paper, I focus on the countervailing effect of decentralization on the accountability mechanism, arguing that decentralization, which increases the number of actors eligible for policy making and implementation in governance as a whole, may blur lines of responsibility, thus weakening citizens’ ability to sanction government in election. By using the ordinary least squares (OLS) interaction model based on historical panel data for 78 countries in the 2002 – 2010 period, I test the hypothesis that as the number of government tiers increases, there will be a negative interaction between the number of government tiers and decentralization policies. The regression results show empirical evidence that decentralization policies, having a positive impact on governance under a relatively simple form of multilevel governance, have no more statistically significant effects as the complexity of government structure exceeds a certain degree. In particular, this paper found that the presence of intergovernmental meeting with legally binding authority have a negative impact on governance when the complexity of government structure reaches to the highest level.
Item Open Access Nonstate Actors and Compliance with International Agreements: An Empirical Analysis of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention(International Organization, 2018-12) Jensen, Nathan M; Malesky, Edmund J