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Replication Data for: Strategic Authoritarianism: The Political Cycles and Selectivity of China’s Tax-Break Policy

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Strategic Authoritarianism: The Political Cycles and Selectivity of China’s Tax-Break Policy
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RIXENU
 
Creator Chen, Ling
Zhang, Hao
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description A rich literature has noted political business cycles in democracies. We argue that in an autocracy with strong bureaucratic institutions, the pressure of evaluation and promotion has also generated political cycles of tax break policies. Furthermore, the timing and content of the evaluation have driven leaders to use tax breaks strategically to build economic performance, producing distributional consequences. Combining panel data of 1,510,153 firm-year observations with city leader data from 1995 to 2007, we find that the tax break rates dropped for most firms during mayors’ turnover years. In the first year of office, i.e., the “busy year,” mayors needed to prioritize large firms and especially large foreign firms. Small domestic private firms bore the cost of tenure cycles. In the last year of the mayor’s tenure, i.e., the “dust-settled” year, there was little incentive to seek promotion, and even important firms could not gain the mayor’s attention.
 
Subject Social Sciences
Political business cycles
Tax
Authoritarianism
Bureaucrats
Economic policy
Institutions
Firms
 
Contributor Chen, Ling
 
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CHTISY: China National Bureau of Statiscis. China High Technology Industry Statistical Yearbook (CHTISY) [2002=2007: China]. Beijing: China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) [distributor], 2008. https://data.cnki.net/area/Yearbook/Single/N2006042068?z=D18


CIES: China National Bureau of Statistics. China Industrial Enterprise Survey (CIES) [1995=2011: China]. Beijing: EPS China Data [distributor], 2012. http://olap.epsnet.com.cn/data-resource.html?d=0


Jiang, Junyan. "Replication Data for: Making Bureaucracy Work: Patronage Networks, Performance Incentives, and Economic Development in China." Cambridge, MA: Harvard Dataverse [distributor], 2018. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/XZ0IZE.v1