November 6th, Seminar Department of Economics | Influence Activities and Bureaucratic Performance: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment in China

 

 

 

 

 

Time: 14:00-15:30, 6th November, 2019 (Wednesday) 

 

Venue: 1610, Rear Main Building, Beijing Normal University 

 

Speaker: He Guojun (Assistant Professor, HkUST) 

 

Host: Cao Siwei

Topic：Influence Activities and Bureaucratic Performance: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment in China

 

 

 

Abstract：Subjective performance evaluation is widely used by firms and governments to provide work incentives. However, delegating evaluation power to senior leadership could induce influence activities: agents might devote much efforts to please their supervisors, rather than focusing on productive tasks that benefit their organizations. We conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment among Chinese local government employees and provide the first rigorous empirical evidence on the existence and implications of influence activities. We find that state employees are able to impose evaluator-specific influence to affect evaluation outcomes, and that this process could be partly observed by their co-workers. Furthermore, introducing uncertainty in the identity of the evaluator, which discourages evaluator-specific influence activities, can significantly improve the work performance of state employees.

 

 

 

 

 

About the Speaker

 

 

 

 

 

 

He Guojun, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Division of Social Sciences, Division of Environment and Sustainable Development, HkUST. He is a research fellow at the Emerging Markets Institute and Public Policy Institute at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and research Director of the China Center at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. He received his bachelor's degree from Peking University, PhD from University of California, Berkeley, and postdoctoral fellow from Harvard University.  His main research interests are environmental and development economics. Papers have been published in proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), American Economic Review (AER P&P), AEJ: Applied, JEEM, BMJ and other important academic journals.