浙江大学区域经济开放与发展研究中心系列讲座No.201957
报告题目：Winter Is Coming: Early-life Experiences and Politicians’ Decisions
主讲人：郭士祺
主持人：宋学印
时间：2019年4月19日（星期五）下午2:00-3:30
地点：浙江大学玉泉校区经济学院432
主讲人简介：
郭士祺，日内瓦高级国际关系及发展学院博士，研究领域为发展经济学，行为与实验经济学，政治经济学，环境经济学，文章发表在Journal of Comparative Economics，《经济研究》（消费金融专辑）。
摘要： The preferences of politicians matter in policy-making. This paper focuses on the role of local politicians’ early-life experiences in their policy decisions while in office. We take China’s Great Famine (1959�61) as a natural experiment and examine its impact on the fiscal decisions of County Party Secretaries (CPS) who experienced this famine in their early childhood. We construct a data set that matches the biographical information of 2,831 CPS with fiscal data of 1,715 counties during 1993�2007.The results indicate that if CPS experienced a more severe famine thatreduced the agricultural population by 10%during their early childhood, other things being equal, they will increase fiscal expenditure on agriculture by 6.8% and increase expenditure on social security by 10.6%. In addition, a 10% more severe famine in early childhood decreases agricultural tax by 38.8%. As a result, the early-life experience of famine leads to more grain production and agricultural employment. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that these influences on agriculture in China are substantial. Furthermore, we also provide evidence that famine experience takes effect through the formation of policy preference for agricultural development, rather than the formation of beliefs about future famine.