Replicating the literature on prefecture-level meritocratic promotion in China

Abstract

China has sustained double-digit economic growth over three decades. A literature has emerged with one possible explanation: meritocratic promotion, where officials at the same level compete with each other on the basis of relative GDP growth, and the winners are rewarded with promotion up the administrative hierarchy. This tournament competition generates strong incentives for politicians to boost growth. I reanalyze this literature, focusing on prefecture-level leaders. I select three papers that study different research questions, but each reports secondary results on meritocratic promotion of prefecture leaders. Reanalyzing these results, I find that the evidence is not robust to alternative control variables, regression specifications, or outcome variables. Overall, I provide an example of a literature seeming to converge on a finding, but where each piece of evidence is unreliable.