Political uncertainty and firm entry: Evidence from Chinese manufacturing industries

Shaojian Chen, Hui Mao and Zongxian Feng

Journal of Business Research, 2020, vol. 120, issue C, 16-30

Abstract: Firm entry promotes the overall vitality and potential of an economy. We examine how political uncertainty, proxied by local government official turnover, affects firm entry in China. We find that political turnover significantly reduces firm entry, particularly when the newly appointed leader is from a different city and when the turnover is not around the National Party Congress. Moreover, our evidence suggests that the effect of political turnover on firm entry is stronger for non-state-owned entrepreneurs and high-technology industries. Our results are robust to assessing selection on unobservable, instrumental variable estimation, HLM analysis, sub-sample without firms in 15 vice-province–level cities and sub-sample without predictable turnovers. Our findings provide solid evidence that political turnover influences firm entry, and shed light upon how the government official exchange system and tenure system in China could be improved to achieve stable economic growth.

Keywords: Political turnover; Uncertainty; Firm entry; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 G15 G18 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296320304616
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:jbrese:v:120:y:2020:i:c:p:16-30

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.07.021

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().