IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlawec/doi10.1086-732187.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Career Incentives, Tournament Competition, and Performance Manipulation: Evidence from Chinese Cities

Author

Listed:
  • Gang Xu
  • Lixin Colin Xu
  • Ruichao Si
  • Ruiting Wang

Abstract

Gross domestic product (GDP) is the most widely used measure for economic growth, and its veracity is vital to researchers and policymakers. In this paper, we study the behavior of misreporting GDP in China and examine how it is shaped by career incentives and tournament competition among local bureaucrats. Based on data on city leaders, official GDP growth, and growth predicted by nighttime lights, our analysis first demonstrates that performance exaggeration increases over the course of the first term of the top bureaucrat and peaks in the last year of the term. This performance manipulation is then shown to be driven by incentives to win the tournament competition: A top bureaucrat’s performance exaggeration increases with the performance of his political rivals, particularly the economically comparable ones. Further evidence suggests that performance exaggeration leads to higher chances of promotion, but the ratchet effect and the potential to blame predecessors promote restraint.

Suggested Citation

  • Gang Xu & Lixin Colin Xu & Ruichao Si & Ruiting Wang, 2025. "Career Incentives, Tournament Competition, and Performance Manipulation: Evidence from Chinese Cities," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 68(2), pages 459-498.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucp:jlawec:doi:10.1086/732187
    DOI: 10.1086/732187
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/732187
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/732187
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1086/732187?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ucp:jlawec:doi:10.1086/732187. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Journals Division (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JLE .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.