庇护关系与污染减排

Recent research suggests that personalized, reciprocal ties within political hierarchies, often described as patronage connections or patron-client networks, can enhance local economic growth. We provide evidence that such informal ties may also facilitate progress on secondary policy objectives: connections between Chinese city and provincial leaders contribute to emissions reductions. To identify these connections, we employ a past-promotion-based method and leverage the reshuffling of both city and provincial leaders. We instrument for patronage using the relative tenure of provincial and city officials. Our analysis focuses on China’s Eleventh Five-Year Plan (2006–2010), which assigned emissions reductions targets to provinces but delegated enforcement to local officials. We present both firm-level and city-level evidence that emissions declined more rapidly in cities where the local leader was connected to the provincial superior. Firms in cities with connected leaders reduced emissions by approximately 10% more than those in unconnected cities. The cleanup is concentrated among foreign and domestically owned private firms and the primary driver is reduced emissions intensity at existing firms. Our findings suggest that alignment through patronage can help mitigate principal-agent problems across government hierarchies in the pursuit of secondary policy objectives.