主 讲 人：北京大学光华管理学院 虞吉海 副教授
题 目：Strategic Interaction in Political Competition: Evidence from Spatial Effects across Chinese Cities
主 持 人：西南财经大学财政税务学院 陈隆近 副教授
时 间：2013年11月28日（星期四）15：00
地 点：柳林校区通博楼C216室
主办单位：西南财经大学财政税务学院、科研处
主讲人简介：
虞吉海，美国俄亥俄州立大学经济学博士。现任北京大学大学光华管理学院副教授。其学术兴趣集中在空间计量经济学、面板数据模型等。已发表的论文见于Journal of Econometrics、Econometric Theory、Regional Science and Urban Economics、Spatial Economic Analysis等学术期刊。
内容摘要：Promotion of local officials in China is decided by their upper-level governments which evaluate their performance largely based on local economic growth. Such a promotion scheme leads to tournament competition among local government leaders at the same level. We test the hypothesis of tournament competition by studying the spatial effects across Chinese prefectural-level cities. Employing recently developed tools in spatial econometrics, we document a strong spatial effect for city-level total investment which fuels short-run economic growth. This spatial effect is shown to occur only for cities within the same province, but not for neighboring cities located in different provinces. We also find that within the same province, the spatial effect mainly exists for cities with similar economic ranking but not for cities that are geographically proximate. The spatial effect tends to diminish for city leaders who are close to the end of their political careers. These findings suggest that the spatial effect in investment is driven by strategic interactions among political rivals in tournament competition. We rule out alternative factors such as economic spillovers and tax competition as the key drivers of the spatial effect.
