https://michaelwiebe.com/blog/2021/02/replications
China has had double-digit economic growth for nearly three decades. How can we explain this? In my dissertation, I studied one explanation that is backed up by a large literature: meritocratic promotion. The idea is that politicians compete in promotion tournaments, where the politician with the highest GDP growth rate in their jurisdiction is rewarded by being promoted. By tying promotion to economic growth, meritocratic promotion creates strong incentives to boost GDP, and hence helps explain China’s rapid growth.
When I collected data on prefecture politicians, however, I found no evidence for meritocracy: there was no correlation between GDP growth and promotion, despite trying many different models. How is this null result consistent with the positive findings in the rest of the literature? To find out, I replicated the main papers claiming evidence for prefecture-level meritocracy. Short answer: the literature is wrong.