Hometown Ties Research Articles

CEO Locality and Employment Stickiness

AbstractWe explore whether CEOs’ hometown identity involves labour adjustment decisions. We document that local CEOs, with their hometown ties, reduce employment to a lesser degree following sales downturns than nonlocal CEOs. This finding suggests that local CEOs’ strong local attachments motivate them to prioritise employee interests and build good reputations, which create private benefits or reserve future career paths in their hometowns. Our findings are more pronounced in areas where local connections are highly valued, thus supporting our argument. We further find that the retention efforts of local CEOs are related to low future performance. We extend the cost stickiness literature by documenting that CEOs’ place attachment influences resource adjustment decisions, particularly regarding labour, which eventually influences subsequent performance.

Electricity market integration in China: The role of government officials’ hometown ties

Market segmentation is common across various sectors, particularly evident in China's electricity market. Meanwhile, officials form a variety of geographic networks due to their innate backgrounds and acquired social connections. An extensive body of studies providing insights into the important role of officials' network ties in resource allocation, but little attention has been paid to the impact of this dynamic process on energy resources. Given that energy plays a significant role in shaping economic growth, our study complements this body of literature by examining how leaders with hometown ties impact inter-provincial electricity trade in China using a gravity model. The gravity model, which has become the traditional framework for estimating the determinants of trade flows, is applicable to the province pairs data structure in our study. Using data on provincial officials' hometown and inter-provincial electricity transactions for 30 provinces in China between 2007 and 2019, the results reveal that a leader whose hometown is i and current jurisdiction is j significantly increases the probability of electricity flowing from i to j, corresponding to a 53.73 % increase, which indicates that they implement a weaker market segmentation on their hometown. Moreover, the results reveal that this effect only occurs in a leader's tenure, and is particularly pronounced when a leader's hometown and current jurisdiction are on the same regional grid, or at least adjacent to each other, or when the current jurisdiction has higher power load levels. The results of mechanism analysis reveal that China's immature electricity market drives officials to leverage hometown ties for market integration, rather than promotion or rent-seeking. Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the broader impact of officials' personal ties. It also provides a valuable insight into the factors facilitating the integration of China's electricity market.

Chinese land complex: Hometown ties and corporate land acquisition

Recent research highlights the significance of hometown ties in the fields of sociology and economics. Using unique, manually-collected microdata of corporate land transactions from China, this study focuses on the hometown ties between municipal officials and corporate executives and investigates their impact on corporate land acquisition outcomes. The results indicate that hometown ties between municipal officials and corporate executives positively influence the likelihood of corporate land acquisition, while concurrently reducing the acquisition cost. Mechanism analyses confirm that the municipal officials have notable control over corporate land allocation. Furthermore, the influence of hometown ties on land acquisition outcomes is primarily facilitated by the private-information and benefit-exchange channels. Heterogeneity analysis at the firm and land type levels are also explored. This study not only deepens the theorectial understanding of hometown ties, but also augments the literature on land resource misallocation from an informal institutional standpoint. Additionally, it offers fresh perspectives to the wider discourse on political connection research.

Auditors’ hometown ties and audit quality

We investigate the relationship between hometown ties among the engagement and review auditors and audit quality by utilizing the data of signing auditors’ hometowns in China during 2007–2019. The results show that hometown ties between the engagement and review auditors are negatively associated with audit quality, as hometown ties can impair peer monitoring and reduce team diversity. Through cross-sectional analyses, we observe that this negative association is mitigated when signing auditors are from Big 10 audit firms, when clients are subject to stronger external supervision, and when signing auditor teams have a higher level of diversity. Besides, the additional analysis indicates that investors perceive the compromised audit quality associated with hometown ties and discount the value of firms. The main result holds in robustness tests and when considering potential endogeneity. Our study adds to the existing literature on audit teams and provides practical and policy insights.

Regional favouritism in Chinese university admissions

AbstractWe study the effect of favouritism via hometown ties of high‐ranking administrators in universities on China's university admissions. By constructing a gravity specification model and collecting the data on inter‐provincial admissions of nearly 1300 Chinese undergraduate universities between 2008 and 2015 and hometown information of the university's top administrators, such as the President or Party Secretary, we show that regional favouritism is prevalent in college enrolment. It is estimated that hometown ties of either the President or Secretary of the Party committee in a university increase the enrolments by almost 11% through admitting students with low entrance examinations scores from their hometowns. Interestingly, the hometown tie effects disappeared after President Xi's launched the anti‐corruption campaign in 2013 and we proved the hometown favouritism in university admissions is a form of corruption through a series of ways.

Hometown favoritism: Effect of environmental governance of politicians returning home

As previous studies demonstrated low effectiveness of formal rules in environmental protection, we explore whether and how informal rules shape environmental governance, thereby adding evidence to behavioral economics. Using data from 2007 to 2015 Chinese listed firms, we employ the difference-in-differences strategy based on shocks of politicians returning home and examine the environmental governance effect of hometown favoritism. We find that politicians who return home improve regional environmental investments only when the environment becomes publicly appealing. This effect is particularly pronounced when public environmental appeal is high. Moreover, government environmental subsidies may be the underlying mechanism for corporate environmental investments. Additionally, we find that the improvement of local environmental quality lasts in the long run. In conclusion, our study reveals the long-term environmental governance effect of informal rules, namely, hometown ties, and provides policy implications that effectively connecting politicians’ incentives to public interests helps provide long-term impetus for regional governance. • We explore whether and how informal rules shape environmental governance. • We use DID strategy based on the shock of politicians returning to their hometown. • Politicians' hometown favoritism can improve local investments in the environment. • Environmental effect is pronounced if public appeal for the environment is strong. • Hometown favoritism closely links politicians' incentive with local public appeal.

Reciprocity in Political Network: Hometown Ties and Intercity Investment in China

Reciprocity in Political Network: Hometown Ties and Intercity Investment in China

Hometown Ties and the Quality of Government Monitoring: Evidence from Rotation of Chinese Auditors

Audits are a standard mechanism for reducing corruption in government investments. The quality of audits themselves, however, may be affected by relationships between auditor and target. We study whether provincial chief auditors in China show greater leniency in evaluating prefecture governments in their hometowns. In city-fixed-effect specifications—in which the role of shared background is identified from auditor turnover—we show that hometown auditors find 38 percent less in questionable monies. This hometown effect is similar throughout the auditor’s tenure and is diminished for audits ordered by the provincial Organization Department as a result of the departure of top city officials. We argue that our findings are most readily explained by leniency toward local officials rather than an endogenous response to concerns of better enforcement by hometown auditors. We complement these city-level findings with firm-level analyses of earnings manipulation by state-owned enterprises (SOE) via real activity manipulation (a standard measure from the accounting literature), which we show is higher under hometown auditors. (JEL D73, H54, H83, L32, M42, O18, P25)

Classed Pathways to Marriage: Hometown Ties, College Networks, and Life after Graduation.

This article identifies mechanisms through which social class background shapes the marital outcomes of college-going white American women. Scholars are interested in the relative influences of ascriptive and achieved characteristics on mate selection. Research indicates that social class background continues to influence the marriage patterns of college-educated Americans but does not identify the mechanisms through which this occurs. The study analyzes six waves of longitudinal interviews with 45 women from differing social class backgrounds. The first interview was conducted at age 18, when women started college at a Midwestern public university. The final interview was collected at age 30, and was supplemented by a survey collecting the income, education, occupation, and debt of women and their spouses. Women from privileged backgrounds were more likely to marry and married men who earned substantially more than the partners of less privileged women. Differences resulted from lifelong variation in social networks, originating in childhood. College did not interrupt long-standing exclusionary class networks. After graduation, social class background shaped where women moved, as well as with whom they worked and socialized. Higher education in the contemporary US may reinforce rather than interrupt class homogamy in marriage, even when students attend the same schools. The role of higher education in shaping classed social networks is in need of further study.

Hometown Ties and Favoritism in Chinese Corporations: Evidence from CEO Dismissals and Corporate Social Responsibility

This paper provides a systematic analysis of how hometown ties, the most common and distinct bases for interpersonal ties to build upon in China, could influence corporate governance in Chinese corporations by focusing on its impact on CEO dismissals and corporate social responsibility. We find that hometown ties between CEOs and board chairs reduce the likelihood of CEO dismissals and that the negative relationship between firm performance and CEO dismissals is weaker for hometown-connected CEOs in locally administered state-owned enterprises, for inside CEOs, for firms located outside board chairs’ hometowns, and for firms operating in regions with low social trust. Moreover, we find consistent evidence that hometown ties affect Chinese firms’ engagement in corporate social responsibility. Our study highlights the important role of hometown ties in Chinese relationship-based corporate governance. It also advances a normative ethical assessment of hometown-based favoritism by highlighting its distinct dynamics and impacts on focal actors and the third parties in specific contexts of actions.

Who Runs China? A Story Told by Machine Learning

China’s politician selection process has been obscure and rarely discussed. This paper uses machine learning approaches to bring economic performance, political patronage and career path into one picture in understanding the provincial level politicians’ selection decision of China. Through mapping out the dynamic politician networks from 1995 to 2015, we find network communities are strongly determined by hometown ties. The predictions using machine learning algorithms including shrinkage and tree-based methods affirm the importance of economic performance, expand the conventional understanding of political patronage with the concept and measurements of social network, and point out the critical impact of career path, with largely reduced testing errors.

Migrant Workers in Beijing: How Hometown Ties Affect Economic Outcomes

Migrant networks have long been regarded as helpful for facilitating migration and assimilation. However, research examining the influence of migrant networks on labour market outcomes for migrants has provided mixed results. This article investigates the impact of hometown ties on migrants’ labour market outcomes in the context of Chinese internal migration, by utilizing data from migrants in Beijing to perform statistical analyses of income and informal employment (i.e. employment without legal documents). After adjusting for the potential bias that results from the workers’ self-selectivity into the use of hometown ties in finding jobs, the analyses show that the hourly income of migrants is lower if they depend on hometown ties to find jobs. Also, migrants who rely on hometown ties for jobs are more likely to be informally employed, which has a detrimental effect on their overall welfare.

Adolescências: a educação, a doença e a droga

Adolescence, defined as a period of social moratorium characterized, among other things, by the process of identifying and differentiating oneself from family, friends and the world, is experienced in different ways, by different subjects and in different realities. With this, the objective of this work is to go through some of these realities, exploring their particularities and the way they perpass in the construction of the identity of the adolescent and reflect in its development; being elaborated from the empirical experience, leading, later, to a bibliographical search. In the reality of the traditional school, the teenager experiences a verticalization of the teacher-student relationship, characterized by little space for speech - which reflects the non-use of creativity in the learner’s learning and an active non-placement of the learner in the room, affecting aspects that make up their development and go beyond the teaching-learning process. In the hospital reality, the illness generates in the adolescent some fears, insecurities and deficits in the construction of his self-image. The hospital-home dichotomy will not always be positive and may lead to school drop-out, distance from the hometown ties and some limitations in food and leisure. In reality the CAPS, the adolescent comes with a demand for drug use. The use of it at this stage of development comes in part from the search for an identity that, in a way, breaks with childhood and brings a sense of community and belonging to adulthood. However, the use of it is also intertwined with the family dynamics and the life history that this adolescent possesses. Finally, it can be concluded that in adolescence there are a plurality of adolescents that can occur with the subject, there are different ways that he can deal with his particular reality and take to himself aspects that will compose his development.

CEO hometown ties and tax avoidance‐evidence from China's listed firms

AbstractThis study investigates the effects of CEO hometown ties on corporate tax avoidance. The results show that CEO hometown ties to local government officials have a significantly positive impact on tax avoidance for private firms in China. We also find that the hometown ties effect is more pronounced in cities with weak public governance and in cities whose municipal Party committee secretaries are promoted from the same city, whereas the effect is weak in cities whose municipal Party committee secretaries are transferred from other places. In summary, our results suggest that hometown ties as an important political resource can facilitate connected private firms to obtain more economic resources from government.

Starting over on Campus or Sustaining Existing Ties? Social Capital during College Among Rural and Non-Rural College Graduates

Rural youth currently graduate from four-year colleges at a similar rate to peers from other locales, even though they are more likely to come from lower SES backgrounds. Scholars attribute their successes to “small town” community social capital; yet the processes through which young people translate social capital into educational attainment remain unspecified. Through analysis of in-depth interviews with disadvantaged rural and non-rural college graduates (n = 43), this study examines how successful students engage social capital to support academic attainment during college. All graduates tended to rely on family social capital for emotional support, high school social capital for academic preparedness, and on-campus peers and mentors for emotional and academic support. Support from community social capital varied, with some rural students severing hometown ties and others keeping them close. Community social capital offered direct benefits for rural students who maintained close ties, and data from this study suggest possible ways that even rural students who severed ties continued to indirectly benefit, such as feeling comfortable seeking out supportive resources and relationships because they are accustomed to being known. Non-rural students, in contrast, benefitted from continued relationships with high school peers on campus, but no other forms of community social capital.

Hometown Ties and Favoritism in Chinese Corporations: Evidence from CEO Dismissal

Social relationships between CEOs and directors are important factors influencing the effectiveness of corporate governance. In this paper, we develop a framework that investigates how a key social...

Social Ties and Favoritism in Chinese Science

We study favoritism via hometown ties, a common source of favor exchange in China, in fellow selection of the Chinese Academies of Sciences and Engineering. Hometown ties to fellow selection committee members increase candidates’ election probability by 39 percent, coming entirely from the selection stage involving an in-person meeting. Elected hometown-connected candidates are half as likely to have a high-impact publication as elected fellows without connections. CAS/CAE membership increases the probability of university leadership appointments and is associated with a US$9.5 million increase in annual funding for fellows’ institutions, indicating that hometown favoritism has potentially large effects on resource allocation.

Bill W

Bill W. considers the life—and life's work—of the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (aa), Bill Wilson (1895–1971). The film is the first feature-length documentary about the man behind one of the twentieth century's most successful nondenominational fellowship movements and a source of hope to millions of people struggling with alcoholism and other addictions. The first work by two young filmmakers, Bill W. is a highly sympathetic but uneven, and eventually unsatisfying, tribute film. The film evokes well aa's cultural milieu: emerging out of the depression in the wake of Prohibition's repeal, yet perfectly suited to the suburban and corporate postwar cultures of the 1950s and 1960s, when face-to-face recruitment such as Tupperware parties and traveling salesman abounded. World War II destabilized community and family relations by significantly increasing geographic mobility, and aa served as a surrogate support network for rootless Americans whose hometown ties had been severed...

Locating Migrant Hometown Ties in Time and Space

This article addresses the under-theorization of locality in migration scholarship and its impediments. It develops a framework to analyze the variation of migrant settlement processes and their translocal dynamics in space and time beyond a national scale. Questions about the temporal dimension of emergent hometown ties and Home Town Associations of migrants in Europe from two cities in Turkey are used to show how these translocal dynamics relate closely to these cities’ efforts to reposition themselves, and how they have also enabled the insertion of emigrants as social actors in these processes. The article argues that the emplacement of migrant translocal dynamics in time requires a spatialized reading of this process while also drawing attention to the resilience of methodological nationalism.