Marketing Seminar（2017-27）

Title: The Economic Impact of China’s Anti-Corruption Campaign

Speaker: Zemin Zhong, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Time: Monday, 20 November, 13:00-14:30

Location: Room K01, Guanghua Building 2

Abstract:

Corruption could either benefit economic growth by greasing the wheel, or distort supply of public goods and create inefficiency. Empirically testing the impact of corruption is difficult due to its evasive nature. We take an alternative approach by investigating the economic impacts of anti-corruption policies. We focus on China’s recent anti-corruption campaign, the largest of its kind in recent history. As an important initiative of this campaign, the Communist Party’s Provincial Committees of Discipline Inspection (PCDI) send inspector teams to investigate municipal governments for potential corruption. The variation in their timing allows us to use a difference-in-difference design to identify their impact on local economy. Using two unique administrative datasets of vehicle and business registration, we find that PCDI visits have a negative impact on both car sales and new business entry. For vehicles, the effect is surprisingly uniform across different price tiers: Luxury brands exhibit a similar drop as domestic brands, suggesting corruption’s impact permeates households across a wide income spectrum. Over time, the effect is strengthening: We observe a 2% drop in the first three months of PCDI visit and a 10% drop one year afterward. The especially large impact cannot be explained by the decline in government officials’ consumption behavior, suggesting anti-corruption efforts also affect the private sector. We test the idea using business registration data, and we found PCDI visits indeed discourage new business registration. We validate our empirical strategy by showing that (1) the timing of PCDI visits cannot be predicted by observable county characteristics and (2) car registrations exhibit parallel pre-treatment trends. Our results suggest there may be a trade-off in anti-corruption and economic growth.?

Introduction:

Zemin (Zachary) Zhong, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

He is interested in behavioral economics, the intersection of IO and political/development economics, and the economics of platforms.

Your participation is warmly welcomed!