Research

Summary: This paper explores a novel consequence of state power expansion in authoritarian regimes: attracting talent from society into the state. We analyze the impact of China's 2016 value-added tax (VAT) reform on citizens' preferences for state employment, revealed by participation in the National Civil Servant Exam (NCSE), a merit-based examination that selects entry-level government elites. We collect an original and comprehensive dataset of 166,012 government job openings posted in NCSE from 2010 to 2021. For each job opening, the dataset contains information about the number of applicants (2010-2021), applicants-recruitment ratio (2010-2021), and minimum entry written-exam score required for job interviews (2014-2021). Among all openings, we focus on tax-related state positions (around 50%).

Since the VAT reform replaced business tax (BT) with VATs which strengthened tax agency's power, we use a difference-in-differences approach that leverages pre-reform subnational tax composition variations. We find that the reform has attracted more and higher-quality individuals to tax-related state positions, particularly for state positions with greater power. We also conduct an original survey to show that exam takers perceive increased power and benefits in tax agencies after the reform. Evidence from Chinese General Social Surveys suggests the talent drawn to the state likely comes from the private sector.  Overall, our research indicates that state power expansion, when paired with merit-based recruitment, significantly influences talent allocation between the state and society in authoritarian settings.

Summary:  This study develops a theory of endogenous faction formation, where a faction’s success or failure hinges on members’ collective effort. The loyalty of factional members is crucial for facilitating coordinated action within the faction. We present a model to illustrate how a political leader cultivates a cohesive faction through strategic screening to identify and exclude opportunistic candidates while retaining loyal members. Using our theory to analyze factional politics in nondemocracies, we show that both the ex-ante distribution of loyalists in the candidate pool and the generosity in rewarding cooperative behavior exhibit a nonmonotonic relationship with the leader’s screening effort. We also show that the leader invests less effort in screening when the larger party in which the faction is embedded has a higher degree of institutionalization. Our model can be extended to incorporate continuous signaling, menu contracts, and intra-party factionalism, offering insights into the complex dynamics of factional politics in nondemocracies.

Summary:  Multitasking agency problems affect government performance. While governments can give high-level authorities discretion to monitor agents’ multitasking performance, such "top-down" control could foster patronage-based relations throughout hierarchies, compounding multitasking problems. However, little research has examined the relationship between multitasking and patronage. We argue that patronage induces agents to prioritize tasks where their superiors face heightened "top-down" pressures, while downplaying other tasks. Exploiting the staggered adoption of Community Stringent Measures (CSMs) across Chinese cities, we compare Chinese local officials' COVID-19 responses based on city officials' patronage connections to provincial superiors, who oversaw their performance and faced pressures to contain infections. CSMs in connected cities more substantially reduced virus infections compared to unconnected cities, but generated more pronounced human mobility reduction and citizen discontent, potentially hindering economic development and social stability. Our findings suggest that agents' multitasking incentives depend on interactions between informal patronage networks and centralized organizations' formal institutions.

Summary: The U.S.’s quantitative easing policies have increasingly become more proactive and substantive. Existing scholarship finds that reiterations of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet expansion and contraction have had clear economic spillover effects on financial markets across borders, given the dollar’s central position in the international monetary system. We argue that the quantitative easing policies of the U.S. also instigate political spillovers to economies that are more dependent on the U.S. capital market. Existing studies find that support for different political regime types often depends on the economic performance of the incumbent regime type, especially for autocracies. This implies that negative spillovers from the monetary policies of core economies can also influence the internal politics of peripheral economies. By focusing on annual deviations of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s balance sheet volume and their relationship to support for incumbent regimes, we find that increased volatility in the Federal Reserve’s balance sheets significantly decreases support for the incumbent political regime in autocracies but does not meaningfully influence support for democracies that have higher financial dependence on the U.S. capital market. This variance is explained by the varied impact of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet volatility on critical economic parameters, which in turn, is explained by the selective extension of bilateral swap arrangements from the Federal Reserve.

Summary: As part of my dissertation, this paper examines how political elites allocate discretionary authority over policymaking and enforcement in authoritarian regimes with a Nomenklatura single-party system. I argue that a single-party regime with a strong party machine could create political pressures to closely monitor policy targets facing bureaucrats. Meanwhile, the ruling party could delegate to bureaucrats extensive discretionary power over procedural details. This strategy helps mitigate the challenges of overseeing bureaucrats who, granted policy discretion, might twist policy outcomes towards their own interests at the cost of higher-ups, in an autocratic context where public oversight and checks and balances are limited. 

Collecting a novel dataset of 440,000 publicized Chinese local regulatory policies (2010-2022), I implemented natural-language-processing (NLP) tasks to identify the extent of discretionary power and policy knowledge that local governments possess. My findings suggest that discretion over procedural details is more likely granted in policy domains subject to target-focused pressures. Moreover, both discretion delegation and target-focused pressures are more likely in domains where higher-level governments lack policy knowledge.