Date: Apr.19^th, 2019

Time: 14:00-15:30

Speaker: GUO Shiqi

Venue: Room 432, School of Economics, Yuquan Campus

[Speaker Intro]

GUO Shiqi is a PhD from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. He studies development economics, behavioral and experimental economics, political economics and environmental economics. His articles published in Journal of Comparative Economics and Economic Research Journal (Consumer Finance album).

【Abstract】

The preferences of politicians matter in policy-making. This paper focuses on the role of local politicians’ early-life experiences in their policy decisions while in office. We take China’s Great Famine (1959–61) as a natural experiment and examine its impact on the fiscal decisions of County Party Secretaries (CPS) who experienced this famine in their early childhood. We construct a data set that matches the biographical information of 2,831 CPS with fiscal data of 1,715 counties during 1993–2007. The results indicate that if CPS experienced a more severe famine that reduced the agricultural population by 10% during their early childhood, other things being equal, they will increase fiscal expenditure on agriculture by 6.8% and increase expenditure on social security by 10.6%. In addition, a 10% more severe famine in early childhood decreases agricultural tax by 38.8%. As a result, the early-life experience of famine leads to more grain production and agricultural employment. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that these influences on agriculture in China are substantial. Furthermore, we also provide evidence that famine experience takes effect through the formation of policy preference for agricultural development, rather than the formation of beliefs about future famine.