Tournament-style political competition and local protectionism: Theory and evidence from China
中文摘要
我们认为，在区域分权型威权体制下，辖区间竞争会扭曲地方官员在本市企业与竞争城市企业之间配置资源的激励。我们构建了一个项目选择的锦标赛模型，以刻画地方保护主义的驱动力。该模型稳健地预测，区域溢出效应与政治竞争激励并存会导致资源配置偏向不利于竞争地区。通过整合独特的数据集，我们在中国城市间政府采购分配和企业股权投资的情境下检验了模型预测。我们发现：第一，当地方官员面临更激烈的政治竞争时，他们向竞争城市的企业分配的政府采购合同更少；第二，本地企业，尤其是地方国有企业，会将地方官员的仕途关切内化，并减少对竞争城市的投资。本文从政治经济学角度为威权体制下由锦标赛式政治竞争激励所导致的低效率地方保护主义提供了一种解释。
Abstract
We argue that interjurisdictional competition in a regionally decentralized authoritarian regime distorts local politicians’ incentives in resource allocation among firms from their own city and a competing city. We develop a tournament model of project selection that captures the driving forces of local protectionism. The model robustly predicts that the joint presence of regional spillover and the incentive for political competition leads to biased resource allocations against the competing regions. Combining unique data sets, we test our model predictions in the context of government procurement allocation and firms’ equity investment across Chinese cities. We find that, first, when local politicians are in more intensive political competition, they allocate fewer government procurement contracts to firms in the competing city; second, local firms, especially local state-owned enterprises (SOEs), internalize the local politicians’ career concerns and invest less in the competing cities. Our paper provides a political economy explanation for inefficient local protectionism in an autocracy incentivized by tournament-style political competition.