Economic Returns to Communist Party Membership: Evidence from Urban Chinese Twins
By Hongbin Li, Pak-wai Liu, Junsen Zhang, Ning Ma. Social Science Research Network, 2007
172 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper estimates the returns to membership of the Chinese Communist Party using unique twins data we collected from China. Our OLS estimate shows that being a Party member increases earnings by 10%, but the within-twin-pair estimate becomes zero. One interpretation of these results is that the OLS Party premium is due to omitted ability and family background. This interpretation would suggest that Party members fare well not because of their special political status per se, but because of the superior ability that made them Party members. The estimates are also consistent with an alternative interpretation that Party membership not only has its own effect but also has an external effect on the sibling.
Subfields: Accounting, Political Science and International Relations, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d5de83b561bd99d8408649546b0190b4132a529d
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Accounting
In Political Science and International Relations
Citations in the corpus
- Access to Markets and Rural Poverty: Evidence from Household Consumption in China (2013, background): “However, more recent evidence based on data on twins shows that party affiliation reflects unobserved heterogeneity in ability, and there is no significant positive rent to party membership (Li et al., 2007).”