Working paper
The Chinese government ("BigBrother”) demands that Social Network Service (SNS) companies (which make “Big Profit”) comply with their order to censor sensitive content. The government threatens to punish SNS companies in case of disobedience. At the same time, the government also benefits from the tax paid by these companies. I document and explain two noticeable trends in China: (i) The level of censorship by SNS companies decreases with their de facto tax rate. (ii) Bigger SNS companies exhibit higher levels of compliance with the government than smaller SNS companies. If the government sets a higher tax rate for the next tax year, it will benefit more from the profit made by the company. Hence the government has weaker incentives to punish the company in case of disobedience. Therefore, the company also has weaker incentives to comply with the government. The higher censorship levels of bigger SNS platforms can be explained by stronger incentives for the government to stop circulating sensitive information on bigger platforms.
This paper explores the interaction between the hierarchical structures of governments and the career concerns of local officials using an infinite-horizon principal-agent model. Local officials either keep working to be promoted or shirk to collect benefits and be fired in the next period. The central government infers from the output of officials whether incumbents work or shirk and promotes those who work. The question is: What structure generates the highest total output? This paper shows that there exists a vertical structure that dominates all horizontal structures. Vertical structures generate less uncertainty in the promotion process and hence a clearer career path than horizontal structures. Therefore, vertical structures are more efficient in incentivizing local officials to work.
This paper explains why autocratic governments draft the emigration policy so that emigration is sometimes easy for citizens and sometimes almost impossible. There are clear gains in opening the floodgates. If more citizens leave the country, fewer citizens will participate in revolutionary activities, making it more likely for the government to remain in power. Under certain conditions, this improvement in stability dominates the loss in GDP caused by emigration.
When to Censor
The censor wants to maximize the receiver’s belief that he is a good type instead of a bad type at an exogenous deadline. The censor chooses when to stop the public discussion about a piece of news, which generates a learning process for the receiver about the censor’s type. If the censor allows more learning, the receiver has a more accurate belief about the type of censor. In equilibrium, if the censor stops the learning process sooner, the receiver believes he is more likely a bad type.
Work in progress
A Good Feminist is a Silent Feminist: How Nationalism Crowded-out Feminism in China
with Liyang Zhou and Yixuan Zhang