Abstract
Many societies preserve traditional culture tied to risk-taking. This paper shows the substantial impact of traditional risk-taking culture on public leadership and governance, leveraging widely-held zodiac beliefs about risk-avoidance in rural China, which follow an exogenous 12-year cycle tied to a person's birth year. Using a representative village panel, I find that village heads in their risk-avoidant zodiac years follow governance processes more and enhance villagers' perception about responsiveness. I also observe consistent expenditure changes, with higher public good spending and a comparable decline in administration spending that is prone to misuse. However, treated leaders are also less likely to promote policy innovation. These results can be most easily reconciled with a shift in village heads' risk-taking, which may yield a potential trade-off between accountability and public entrepreneurship.