Political Turnover, Ownership, and Corporate Investment

Abstract

We examine the impact of government influence and ownership on corporate investment by exploiting the unique way provincial leaders are selected and promoted in China. The tournament-style promotion system creates incentives for new provincial governors to exert their influence over capital allocation, particularly during the early years of the term. Using a neighboring-province difference-in-differences estimation approach, we find that there is a divergence in investment rates between state owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-state owned enterprises (non-SOEs) following political turnover. SOEs experience an abnormal increase in investment by 6.0% in the year following the turnover, consistent with the incentives of a new governor to stimulate investment. In contrast, investment rates for non-SOEs decline significantly post-turnover, suggesting that the political influence exerted over SOEs crowds out private investment. The effects of political turnover on investment are mainly driven by turnovers with less-educated or local-born successors. Finally, we provide evidence that the political incentives around the turnover of provincial governors create a misallocation of capital as measures of investment efficiency decline post-turnover.