A model of tournament incentives with corruption

Bin Wang and Yu Zheng

Journal of Comparative Economics, 2020, vol. 48, issue 1, 182-197

Abstract: The institution that has enabled decades of rapid economic growth in China features lower-level government officials competing for promotion to a higher level by promoting local economic growth. Theoretically, this tournament-style promotion scheme calls for a convex wage scale to effectively elicit effort. However, the empirically observed public-sector pay scale is rather concave in China. We reconcile the theoretical prediction on the wage progressivity with its empirical counterpart by recognizing other implicit forms of incentives of rising to the top made possible by another institutional feature of China: the top-down disciplinary inspection.

Keywords: Institution; Tournament; Corruption; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 J45 O43 P26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Working Paper: A Model of Tournament Incentives with Corruption (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jcecon:v:48:y:2020:i:1:p:182-197

DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2019.09.003

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