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• Thread: 642 Goods vs 148 No Goods

1. Economist
   f896
   

   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.

   1 year ago # QUOTE 61 Volod 3 Vlad !

2. Economist
   5147
   

   Nice.

   1 year ago # QUOTE 2 Volod 0 Vlad !

3. Economist
   27ae
   

   People like Li-an Zhou and James Kung are the ultimate p-hackers. Almost every single well published paper of theirs involves some very fishy components if you look closely.

   1 year ago # QUOTE 31 Volod 1 Vlad !

4. Economist
   6ebc
   

   This is hilarious!

   1 year ago # QUOTE 10 Volod 0 Vlad !

5. Economist
   051e
   

   Up

   1 year ago # QUOTE 1 Volod 0 Vlad !

6. Economist
   08c1
   

   Great service to the profession. Thanks!

   1 year ago # QUOTE 8 Volod 0 Vlad !

7. Economist
   7430
   

   My conclusion is that publication incentives, conformism, and inadequate peer review led to a literature of false results.

   Good job. Hope he can find a spot in academia.

   1 year ago # QUOTE 11 Volod 0 Vlad !

8. Economist
   eccc
   

   He has sociology papers

   1 year ago # QUOTE 2 Volod 5 Vlad !

9. Economist
   d26d
   

   Weren't the GDP data fa.ked by the local authorities?

   1 year ago # QUOTE 7 Volod 0 Vlad !

10. Economist
    a027
    

    James Kung is a fraud. His APSR paper misreported the main specification (claimed to have included fixed effects but didn't). Running the main regression as reported completely kills his results. There are MANY other examples like this.

    1 year ago # QUOTE 30 Volod 0 Vlad !

11. Economist
    eb43
    

    Weren't the GDP data fa.ked by the local authorities?

    That should be the immediate suspicion.

    1 year ago # QUOTE 0 Volod 0 Vlad !

12. Economist
    051e
    

    Weren't the GDP data fa.ked by the local authorities?

    His conclusions are that given identical datasets, the lit can't be replicated.

    Whether you should trust these datasets in the first place is a different question.

    1 year ago # QUOTE 6 Volod 0 Vlad !

13. Economist
    a027
    

    Chen and Kung (2019)
    Chen and Kung (2019), published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, studies land corruption in China, with secondary results on meritocratic promotion. The main result is that local politicians provide price discounts on land sales to firms connected to Politburo members, and these local politicians are in turn rewarded with promotion up the bureaucratic ladder.

    For provincial leaders, they find a strong effect of land sales on promotion for secretaries, but not for governors. In contrast, GDP growth strongly predicts promotion for governors, but not secretaries. They conclude that “the governor has to rely on himself for promotion, specifically by improving economic performance or GDP growth in his jurisdiction [...] only the provincial party secretaries are being rewarded for their wheeling and dealing".

    They find similar results at the prefecture level: land deals predict promotion for secretaries, but not for mayors, while GDP growth predicts promotion for mayors, but not for secretaries. Overall, this supports the model of party secretaries being responsible for social policy, while governors (and mayors) are in charge of the economy, with performance on these tasks determining promotion. Thus, at both province and prefecture levels, government leaders (governors and mayors) compete in a promotion tournament based on GDP growth, while party secretaries do not.

    However, Chen and Kung (2019)’s results for prefecture mayors are questionable, because their promotion data seems wrong. In my data, the annual promotion rate varies from 5 to 30% (peaking in Congress years), while the Chen and Kung (2019) data never exceeds 15% and has six years where the promotion rate is less than 2%. Figure 1 compares the annual promotion rate from Chen and Kung to my own data as well as the data from Yao and Zhang (2015) and Li et al. (2019), where each paper uses a binary promotion variable (and data on prefecture mayors). While the latter three sources broadly agree on the promotion rate, the Chen and Kung data is a clear outlier. This is obviously suspect.

    Furthermore, upon investigating this discrepancy, I discovered apparent data errors in their promotion variable. The annual promotion variable is defined to be 1 in the year a mayor is promoted, and 0 otherwise. However, out of the 201 cases with Promotion=1, 124 occur before the mayor’s last year in office (with the remaining 77 cases occuring in the last year). Moreover, this variable is equal to 1 multiple times per spell in 4% of leader spells. Out of 1216 spells, 51 spells have Promotion=1 more than once per spell. For example, consider a mayor who is in office for five years and then promoted; the promotion variable should be 0 in the first four years, then 1 in the final year. However, the Chen and Kung data has spells where the promotion variable is, for example, 0 in the first two years, and 1 in the final three years.

    To fix this error, I obtained the raw mayor data from James Kung, and used it to generate a corrected annual promotion variable, which is 1 only in a mayor’s final year in office (when the mayor is promoted). This data-coding error more than doubles the number of promotions. But since the Chen and Kung promotion rate is smaller than the rest of the literature, fixing the data errors in fact makes the disagreement with the literature even more pronounced.

    So this promotion data looks pretty lousy. Naturally, we should worry that their data is driving their finding of meritocratic promotion for prefecture mayors. To test this, I re-run their analysis using my own promotion data. I find that the correlation between GDP growth and promotion is now negative and nonsignificant. So just like the other two papers, Chen and Kung (2019) also fails to provide evidence for meritocratic promotion of prefecture leaders.

    This is extremely suspicious. Speculating, it looks like the authors ha...See full post

    1 year ago # QUOTE 25 Volod 0 Vlad !

14. Economist
    9fa2
    

    LJL

    1 year ago # QUOTE 0 Volod 0 Vlad !

15. Economist
    bdc2
    

    "I’m a data scientist currently looking for work.

    I graduated with a PhD in Economics from the University of British Columbia in 2020."

    I wonder why

    1 year ago # QUOTE 4 Volod 14 Vlad !

16. Economist
    93bf
    

    "I’m a data scientist currently looking for work.
    I graduated with a PhD in Economics from the University of British Columbia in 2020."
    I wonder why

    He could be from Mars and it still should not matter. Either he is right, or he is wrong.

    1 year ago # QUOTE 21 Volod 2 Vlad !

17. Economist
    48e5
    

    This looks more like a newspaper article than a scientific paper. If you want to say that people are wrong, point exactly to what they do wrong. Don't come with BS stories like "In short, researchers doing follow-up work knew that they had to confirm the original results.". Given how vague these statements are, real scientists are going to point out what is wrong on his "paper" soon.

    1 year ago # QUOTE 4 Volod 12 Vlad !

18. Economist
    d116
    

    i applaud the replication efforts but wish the person could have written a more mature summary of this. perhaps in form of a paper instead of blogging allegations of intent. these are very serious accusations and going after a bunch of chinese authors seems like a very cheap stereotypical shot. there is also a difference between being able to replicate the results or the results being robust. you can always find a robustness check to kill an empirical result.

    1 year ago # QUOTE 11 Volod 7 Vlad !

19. Economist
    eadc
    

    Did you even read the blog? He provided the link to his paper, which was a chapter of his dissertation.

    i applaud the replication efforts but wish the person could have written a more mature summary of this. perhaps in form of a paper instead of blogging allegations of intent. these are very serious accusations and going after a bunch of chinese authors seems like a very cheap stereotypical shot. there is also a difference between being able to replicate the results or the results being robust. you can always find a robustness check to kill an empirical result.

    1 year ago # QUOTE 19 Volod 1 Vlad !

20. Economist
    eadc
    

    Kung is the Voth of China: economic historian who doesn't really understand history, p-hacks for a living, extremely corrupt, complete azzh0le.

    James Kung is a fraud. His APSR paper misreported the main specification (claimed to have included fixed effects but didn't). Running the main regression as reported completely kills his results. There are MANY other examples like this.

    1 year ago # QUOTE 24 Volod 0 Vlad !

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