Leadership vacuum and corporate investment
研究发现中国城市政治领导空缺期间，企业投资平均每月下降2.326%，其机制包括政策不确定性增加、政府效率降低和政治联系中断，对年轻企业、非国企及市场化慢地区的企业影响更大。
The vacuum caused by the absence of a political leader has a major economic impact. We manually collect data on the absence of a political leader in 247 Chinese cities between 2009 and 2019 and find that firms reduce their investment by an average of 2.326 % for each month that a political office remains vacant. This result holds even after subjecting the data to a series of endogeneity tests, robustness tests, and alternative explanations. We also demonstrate that the absence of a political leader reduces corporate investment through increased uncertainty of economic policy, reduced governmental efficiency, and disrupted political connections. Finally, our results show that this kind of absence has a more pronounced impact on younger firms, firms located in provinces with slower marketization, firms located in provinces with weak media development, non-state-owned enterprises, and firms located in regions under significant promotional pressure.