Seminar Vol. 139

Title: Influence Activities and Bureaucratic Performance: Experimental Evidence from China

Speaker: Guojun He, HKUST

Time: April 12th, 2019 13:30–14:45

Venue: Conference Room 106B, Zhonghui Building (IESR, JNU College of Economics)

About the speaker:

Guojun He is an Assistant Professor at Division of Social Science, Division of Environment and Sustainability, and Department of Economics at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He is also a Faculty Affiliate of HKUST's Institute for Emerging Market Studies and Institute for Public Policy. In addition, Guojun He holds concurrent appointment at the University of Chicago's interdisciplinary Energy Policy Institute and serves as the Research Director of its China center (EPIC-China). Before joining HKUST, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard School of Public Health and obtained his Ph.D. degree in Agricultural and Resource Economics from U.C. Berkeley in 2013. Guojun He's primary research interests are Environmental Economics, Health Economics, Development Economics and Political Economy. 

Abstract:

Subjective performance evaluation is widely used by firms and governments to provide work incentives. However, delegating evaluation power to senior leadership could cause influence activities: agents might devote much efforts to please their supervisors, rather than focusing on productive tasks that benefit their organizations. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment among Chinese grassroots civil servants and provide the first quantitative evidence on the existence and implications of influence activities. We find that introducing uncertainty in the identity of the evaluator, which discourages evaluator-specific influence activities, can significantly improve the performance of state employees.