时 间：September 17, 2019.20th (Friday), 16:15-17:30PM

地 点：Room 121, Administration Building

主 题：Starving and Deceiving: Famine Experience, Politician Risk Preference, and GDP Manipulation in China

主讲人：Shuo Chen

摘 要：

Recent studies have found that the childhood experience of natural disasters shape people’s behaviors by changing their risk preferences. Yet less studies explore whether natural disasters would change politicians’ behaviors. Based on a novel dataset covering information on 5,389 county party secretaries in China, this article employs China’s Great Famine of 1959-61 as an exogenous shock to empirically explore whether the childhood experience of famine affects officials’ GDP manipulation behavior. We find that officials who experienced famine in childhood are less likely to cheat on GDP data. The results are robust after controlling for a range of socio-economic indicators, the level of promotion incentives for officials, and other shocks such as the Cultural Revolution. Further empirical evidence reveals that famine experiences make officials risk averse through the above mechanisms.

报告人简介：

Shuo Chen is a professor from Department of Economics, Fudan University. He earned his Ph. D in Social Science from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2011. His research interests include political economy, economic history and applied micro-econometrics. He has published on academic journals, such as Journal of Economic Growth, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Political Science Review, China Economic Review etc.

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