题目：Political Turnovers, Career Concerns and the Environmental Performance: Evidence from Local Officials in China

时间：2020年7月9日（周四）14:00

地点：腾讯会议（会议 ID：720 291 362；会议密码：226091）

主讲人：吴明琴

主讲人简介：

吴明琴，华南师范大学经济与管理学院教授。研究方向集中在发展经济学和区域经济学，目前主持国家自然科学基金等项目。

 摘要: Does it pay to be “greener” as a local official in China? All else equal, does less pollution increase the chances of promotion for Chinese local leaders? In this paper, we examine the effect of local environment regulation outcomes, i.e., local pollution, on county leaders’ chances of promotion. This is an important question because only when the Chinese cadre evaluation system rewards local officials’ green behaviors, these officials would move away from their past priority in promoting economic growth at all costs, so that the environmental crisis in China might be addressed. We collect county party secretary data for over 2000 Chinese counties between 2001 and 2014 to measure their promotion patterns. We construct county-year SO2 and PM2.5 air pollution measures using fine-grained NASA satellite data. Importantly, we take advantage of a significant national policy change – the implementation of the 11th Five-Year Plan, starting in 2006 – which for the first time added environmental performance as an indicator for local officials’ promotion evaluation. Our empirical analysis shows that for county party secretaries, those who were able to reduce air pollution more than their predecessors and peers are much more likely to be promoted. Moreover, we only observe this “rewarding” effect of air pollution reduction after the implementation of the 11th Five-Year Plan.