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Working papers
1. The Rise of the Superrich and Authoritarian Survival: Theory and Cross-national Evidence
2. Officials' Rotation, Bureaucratic Control, and Corruption: Evidence from Chinese Firms
[Recently discussed on the Transparency International’s Anti-Corruption Research Network]
3. Learn from the Visible: Return to Political Offices and Political Strategy of Chinese Private Entrepreneurs (dissertation chapter)
4. Political Incorporation, Exchanges, and Government Subsidies: Evidence from Chinese Firms (dissertation chapter)
Work in progress
1. Political Incorporation, Taxation, and Corruption: Theory and Evidence (dissertation chapter)
2. Elites, Networks, and Political Reforms (with Ting Chen)
3. Taming Local Agents in a Non-democratic State: Experimental Evidence from China (with Chao-yo Cheng and Tao Lin)
Peer-reviewed journal articles
"Strategic Promotion, Reputation, and Responsiveness in Bureaucratic Hierarchies" (with Xinyu Fan). Journal of Theoretical Politics, forthcoming.
[Online Appendix]
Abstract: While existing studies usually model promotion as a bilateral interaction between promoter and promotee, it is not uncommon that the promoter is under the influence of a third-party. For instance, authoritarian rulers may consider how their interactions with local agents change the way that citizens view them. Similarly, a mid-tier officer in a bureaucratic hierarchy often concerns herself with her image in the eyes of her superior when managing her subordinates. In this paper, we construct a game-theoretic model to investigate promotion strategies when promoters have reputation concerns. We show that promoters can use promotion as a signaling tool, where she can deliberately postpone promoting the subordinate to enhance her own reputation. Furthermore, the promoter has extra incentives to shirk, knowing that she can manipulate promotion in the future. Thus, strategic promotions decrease government responsiveness. Counter-intuitively, such decrease is more severe when intra-bureaucracy information is more transparent. In other words, transparency may do more harm than good. We conduct a case study of the Chinese bureaucracy and provide supportive evidence.
"Organizational Structure, Policy Learning, and Economic Performance: Evidence from the Chinese Commune," (with Joshua Eisenman). Socius. 2018. 4: 1–18.
[Socius is the open-access journal of the American Sociological Association (ASA).]
Abstract: Using original county-level panel data on Chinese communes over two decades, 1958 to 1979, this article builds upon existing theories about the influence of organizational size and structure on institutional performance. We found a consistent and robust interaction effect among the size of the commune (i.e., the coordination level) and its subunits, the brigade (i.e., the supervisory level) and production teams (i.e., the working level), on agricultural productivity. Future work on the relationship between organizational performance and size would likely benefit from including such interaction variables. We also provide evidence that to create a more productive institution, county-level officials learned from their most productive neighbors and adjusted the size of their communes accordingly. This work explains the role of organizational structure as a driver of economic performance and how policy diffusion occurred during China’s Maoist era—a period generally treated as a monolith rather than a period of institutional change.
Pre-PhD:
"Overseas Students, Returnees and the Diffusion of International Norms into Post-Mao China," (with David Zweig), International Studies Review, 2014, 16(2): 252-63.
"Authoritarian Orientations and Political Trust in East Asian Societies," (with Deyong Ma), East Asia, 2014, 34(4): 323-41.
Working papers
1. The Rise of the Superrich and Authoritarian Survival: Theory and Cross-national Evidence
2. Officials' Rotation, Bureaucratic Control, and Corruption: Evidence from Chinese Firms
[Recently discussed on the Transparency International’s Anti-Corruption Research Network]
3. Learn from the Visible: Return to Political Offices and Political Strategy of Chinese Private Entrepreneurs (dissertation chapter)
4. Political Incorporation, Exchanges, and Government Subsidies: Evidence from Chinese Firms (dissertation chapter)
Work in progress
1. Political Incorporation, Taxation, and Corruption: Theory and Evidence (dissertation chapter)
2. Elites, Networks, and Political Reforms (with Ting Chen)
3. Taming Local Agents in a Non-democratic State: Experimental Evidence from China (with Chao-yo Cheng and Tao Lin)
Peer-reviewed journal articles
"Strategic Promotion, Reputation, and Responsiveness in Bureaucratic Hierarchies" (with Xinyu Fan). Journal of Theoretical Politics, forthcoming.
[Online Appendix]
Abstract: While existing studies usually model promotion as a bilateral interaction between promoter and promotee, it is not uncommon that the promoter is under the influence of a third-party. For instance, authoritarian rulers may consider how their interactions with local agents change the way that citizens view them. Similarly, a mid-tier officer in a bureaucratic hierarchy often concerns herself with her image in the eyes of her superior when managing her subordinates. In this paper, we construct a game-theoretic model to investigate promotion strategies when promoters have reputation concerns. We show that promoters can use promotion as a signaling tool, where she can deliberately postpone promoting the subordinate to enhance her own reputation. Furthermore, the promoter has extra incentives to shirk, knowing that she can manipulate promotion in the future. Thus, strategic promotions decrease government responsiveness. Counter-intuitively, such decrease is more severe when intra-bureaucracy information is more transparent. In other words, transparency may do more harm than good. We conduct a case study of the Chinese bureaucracy and provide supportive evidence.
"Organizational Structure, Policy Learning, and Economic Performance: Evidence from the Chinese Commune," (with Joshua Eisenman). Socius. 2018. 4: 1–18.
[Socius is the open-access journal of the American Sociological Association (ASA).]
Abstract: Using original county-level panel data on Chinese communes over two decades, 1958 to 1979, this article builds upon existing theories about the influence of organizational size and structure on institutional performance. We found a consistent and robust interaction effect among the size of the commune (i.e., the coordination level) and its subunits, the brigade (i.e., the supervisory level) and production teams (i.e., the working level), on agricultural productivity. Future work on the relationship between organizational performance and size would likely benefit from including such interaction variables. We also provide evidence that to create a more productive institution, county-level officials learned from their most productive neighbors and adjusted the size of their communes accordingly. This work explains the role of organizational structure as a driver of economic performance and how policy diffusion occurred during China’s Maoist era—a period generally treated as a monolith rather than a period of institutional change.
Pre-PhD:
"Overseas Students, Returnees and the Diffusion of International Norms into Post-Mao China," (with David Zweig), International Studies Review, 2014, 16(2): 252-63.
"Authoritarian Orientations and Political Trust in East Asian Societies," (with Deyong Ma), East Asia, 2014, 34(4): 323-41.