Career Incentives of City Leaders and Urban Spatial Expansion in China
研究了城市领导人的职业激励如何影响中国城市空间扩张，发现激励强度每增加一个标准差，城市向外扩张约9公里，并指出过强激励可能带来扭曲效应。
This paper develops a theoretical framework to study the critical role that politics play in shaping the spatial dimension of China's urbanization and the related welfare implications. Utilizing a large data set of residential land transactions matched with city leaders in 200 Chinese cities from 2000 through 2011, the empirical analysis finds that a 1 standard deviation increase in the career-incentive measure leads to 9 additional kilometers of outward expansion, a 23% increase relative to the sample average. It also finds some suggestive evidence pointing to the distortionary impacts of overly strong incentives of city leaders on spatial expansion, consistent with the theory.