Speaker：Pinghan LIANG（Professor， Department of Public Administration，Director, Center for Empirical and Experimental Studies inPublic Administration，Sun Yat-sen University）
Description：Thepreferences of politicians matter in policy-making. This paper focuses on therole of local politicians’ early-life experiences in their policy decisionswhile in office. We take China’s Great Famine (1959–61) as a natural experimentand examine its impact on the fiscal decisions of County Party Secretaries(CPS) who experienced this famine in their early childhood. We construct a dataset that matches the biographical information of 2,831 CPS with fiscal data of1,715 counties during 1993–2007. The results indicate that if CPS experienced amore severe famine that reduced the agricultural population by 10% during theirearly childhood, other things being equal, they will increase fiscalexpenditure on agriculture by 6.8% and increase expenditure on social securityby 10.6%. In addition, a 10% more severe famine in early childhood decreasesagricultural tax by 38.8%. As a result, the early-life experience of famine leadsto more grain production and agricultural employment. A back-of-the-envelopecalculation suggests that these influences on agriculture in China aresubstantial. Furthermore, we also provide evidence that famine experience takeseffect through the formation of policy preference for agricultural development,rather than the formation of beliefs about future famine..
Time: March 28, 2019（Thursday）, 15：00-17：00
Venue: Shahe Main Teaching Building, room 301
