Lunbo Zhang

Political agency models predict that officials with higher continuation values of office exert greater effort when observable performance is tied to career rewards. We test this prediction in China’s top-down cadre system, where the 2012 leadership reshuffle following the 18th Chinese Communist Party Congress coincided with the elevation of PM2.5 reduction to an explicit cadre-evaluation criterion. Using data from Chinese prefecture-level cities between 2008 and 2015, we implement a difference-in-differences design comparing cities led by first-term and reappointed leaders. We find that post-2012, first-term leaders achieved larger PM2.5 reductions than reappointed leaders. This gap reflects first-term leaders’ longer career horizons and weaker pre-existing capture relationships with incumbent polluters. Consistent with multitask incentive theory, first-term leaders exert greater effort on measurable, fast-acting administrative instruments such as production restrictions, while green subsidies and technological innovation show no significant term-stage difference. The paper provides new evidence on political agency, regulatory capture, and multitask incentives in top-down bureaucratic systems.

Industrial land conveyance may serve as an upstream margin of environmental accountability. We study China’s Environmental “One-Vote Veto” system, under which local officials become ineligible for promotion if mandatory SO2 reduction targets are missed, and examine how industrial land conveyance varies with this accountability pressure. Our design combines cross-city variation in target stringency with within-cycle variation in enforcement intensity to estimate within-cycle differential tightening. Tighter mandates are associated with both a smaller share and a smaller total area of industrial land conveyed to SO2-intensive industries during the high-enforcement period than during the transition period. Within this comparison, minimum investment-intensity requirements are higher, and the remaining allocations are more concentrated among larger recipients. Separate estimates indicate more positive allocation gradients toward state- or collectively controlled recipients and toward newly designated construction land, and a sharper contraction in ecologically sensitive peripheral areas. Taken together, the findings suggest that industrial land conveyance is one upstream margin through which environmental accountability may shape pollution-intensive entry.