Calendrier du 05 avril 2023
Development Economics Seminar
Du 05/04/2023 de 16:30 à 18:00
co-organized with the PEPES seminar. Salle R2.01, Campus Jourdan
YANG David (Harvard University)
Policy Experimentation in China: the Political Economy of Policy Learning
Many governments have engaged in policy experimentation in various forms to resolve uncertainty and facilitate learning. However, little is understood about the characteristics of policy experimentation, and how the structure of experimentation may affect policy learning and policy outcomes. We aim to describe and understand China's policy experimentation since 1980, among the largest and most systematic in recent history. We collect comprehensive data on policy experimentation conducted in China over the past four decades. We find that, while experimentation outcomes strongly predict whether policies roll out nationally, the experimentation exhibits two characteristics that complicate policy learning. First, about 90% of the experiments exhibit positive sample selection in terms of a locality’s economic development. Second, promotion-driven local politicians allocate more resources to ensure the experiments' success, and such effort is not replicable when policies roll out to the entire country. The presence of sample selection and strategic effort is not fully accounted for by the central government, affecting policy learning and distorting national policies originating from the experimentation. Taken together, these results suggest that, while China’s bureaucratic and institutional conditions make policy experimentation possible at an unparalleled scale, the complex political environments can also limit the scope and bias the direction of policy learning
PEPES (Paris Empirical Political Economics) Working Group
Du 05/04/2023 de 16:30 à 18:00
co-organized with the PSE development seminar. Salle R2.01
YANG David (PSE)
Policy Experimentation in China: the Political Economy of Policy Learning
Many governments have engaged in policy experimentation in various forms to resolve uncertainty and facilitate learning. However, little is understood about the characteristics of policy experimentation, and how the structure of experimentation may affect policy learning and policy outcomes. We aim to describe and understand China's policy experimentation since 1980, among the largest and most systematic in recent history. We collect comprehensive data on policy experimentation conducted in China over the past four decades. We find that, while experimentation outcomes strongly predict whether policies roll out nationally, the experimentation exhibits two characteristics that complicate policy learning. First, about 90% of the experiments exhibit positive sample selection in terms of a locality’s economic development. Second, promotion-driven local politicians allocate more resources to ensure the experiments' success, and such effort is not replicable when policies roll out to the entire country. The presence of sample selection and strategic effort is not fully accounted for by the central government, affecting policy learning and distorting national policies originating from the experimentation. Taken together, these results suggest that, while China’s bureaucratic and institutional conditions make policy experimentation possible at an unparalleled scale, the complex political environments can also limit the scope and bias the direction of policy learning
Economic History Seminar
Du 05/04/2023 de 12:00 à 13:30
R1.09, Campus Jourdan
LOPEZ CERMENO Alexandra (Lund University)
The Long run unexpected consequences of the arsenal of democracy
This paper aims to evaluate why some public investment programmes thrive in promoting regional economic growth while others fail. We use the largest government procurement programme in the history of the US as a natural experiment. Our database consists of 13,531 individual observations of geocoded data by industry and good of US federal investments during WWII. We split the analysis into developed industrial counties (industrial clusters, high, medium, and low tech) and less industrialized counties (agricultural) and measure the impact of the investments using differences in differences analysis combined with propensity score matching.
Our main result is that Federal investments were successful depending on the previous comparative advantage of the counties that obtained the public funds. Therefore, we find no significant effect on less industrialized counties but a significant one on the manufacturing and service sectors of industrial counties. We also show that returns of the war investments depended both on their nature and location (and their interaction) according to technology type. We observe a significantly larger effect of those investments where their relative technology intensity corresponds with the comparative advantage of their location. The higher returns corresponded to high-tech investments in counties already specialized in that type of manufacturing production. These results have some important implications for the design of regional and industrial policies