Career Incentives of City Leaders and Urban Spatial Expansion in China

Zhi Wang, Qinghua Zhang and Li-An Zhou
Additional contact information
Zhi Wang: Fudan University
Qinghua Zhang: Peking University

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2020, vol. 102, issue 5, 897-911

Abstract: This paper develops a theoretical framework to study the critical role that politics play in shaping the spatial dimension of China's urbanization and the related welfare implications. Utilizing a large data set of residential land transactions matched with city leaders in 200 Chinese cities from 2000 through 2011, the empirical analysis finds that a 1 standard deviation increase in the career-incentive measure leads to 9 additional kilometers of outward expansion, a 23% increase relative to the sample average. It also finds some suggestive evidence pointing to the distortionary impacts of overly strong incentives of city leaders on spatial expansion, consistent with the theory.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest_a_00862 (application/pdf)
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

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:tpr:restat:v:102:y:2020:i:5:p:897-911

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().