Many societies preserve traditional culture tied to risk-taking. This paper shows the substantial impact of traditional culture on public leadership and governance, leveraging widely-held zodiac beliefs about risk-avoidance in rural China, which follow an exogenous 12-year cycle based on a person’s birth year. Using a representative village panel, I find that village heads in their risk-avoidant zodiac years follow governance processes more and enhance villagers’ perception about responsiveness. I also observe consistent expenditure changes, with higher public good spending and a comparable decline in administration spending that is prone to misuse. However, treated leaders are also less likely to promote policy innovation. These results can be most easily reconciled with a shift in village heads’ risk-taking, which may yield a potential trade-off between accountability and public entrepreneurship.

Coverage: National Affairs

      We study the impact of history curricula on national identity in Taiwan. The high school curriculum reform of September 2006 separates the history of Taiwan from Chinese chronology and increases Taiwan-oriented content to transmit Taiwanese identity. We document an unintended "backlash" that individuals studying the new curriculum are more likely to hold both greater Taiwanese and Chinese identities. Our analysis suggests endogenous changes in information demand as a prominent mechanism: treated high schoolers show greater identity awareness and acquire more information related to both identities. We further observe consistent attitudinal changes, with milder political views and an increase in votes for median candidates or abstention.

This paper studies the impact of anti-corruption on the quality of state job candidates. I combine China’s staggered anti-corruption inspections with unique real applicant records — including a non-self-reported psychometric measure of integrity — and post-recruitment performance data. I find that the crackdown induces positive selection on integrity and prosociality into the state sector, without reducing overall ability. These compositional shifts are associated with improved post-recruitment performance. Further evidence suggests talent reallocation as a prominent short-run mechanism: following the shock, individuals with higher integrity and prosociality show higher preferences for state jobs — even conditional on ability and other psychometric traits. I also document suggestive dynamic effects wherein households increase investment in the human capital and integrity of the next generation, potentially reinforcing the allocational effects in the longer run. Together, these findings shed new light on how reward structures shape the state-sector human capacity.

We study favoritism in the selection of elite scientific talent, by examining the relationship between host institution affiliation and performance in the Chinese Science Olympiad, where a gold medal guarantees a student's admission to top universities. Using hand-collected participant-level data (2003 - 2021), we find that host-affiliated students have a significantly higher winning probability, and the effect is more pronounced in host provinces where corruption norms are more prevalent. We present evidence suggestive of cheating behavior using a portion of the contest vulnerable to information leakage, as well as the centralized post-Olympiad selection outside the control of host provinces. Together, our findings shed light on the crucial role of organizational structure in designing equitable assessment systems for talent.