Military background officials, risk awareness, and local government fiscal balance: Novel evidence from text analysis of Chinese local officials' news reports

Cheng Cheng, Bo Huang, Yiqian Wang and Lei Hu

China Economic Review, 2024, vol. 85, issue C

Abstract: By introducing the method of “excess” analysis in corporate finance to quantify the fiscal balance in regional economics, we analyze the heterogeneous impact of municipal party secretaries with military backgrounds on local economic development in 275 prefecture-level cities in China. We find that military background officials can significantly decrease local fiscal imbalance, and reduce excess fiscal expenditure and fiscal deficit. Military background officials have significantly reduced the number and area of the regional industrial land allocation, possessed a lower risk preference for the development of the regional financial industry, and significantly reduced the issuance probability and risk premium of Chengtou bonds. Through data mining and machine learning text analysis, we find that military background officials have a higher risk prevention attitude, which is proportional to the military experience length and inversely proportional to the time interval from their military service discharge to the local government leaders. The results are valid after a series of robustness tests. This paper is of great significance to the creation of officials' behavioural analysis on regional economic development and has vital enlightenment to the appointment and administration of local officials in China.

Keywords: Military background officials; Fiscal balance; Risk awareness; Machine learning text analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X24000555
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chieco:v:85:y:2024:i:c:s1043951x24000555

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2024.102166

Access Statistics for this article

China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu

More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().