Publication
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Betting on Borrowed Time in Infrastructure Investment: How Local Officials' Tenure Expectations Drive China's Subway Gamble
Despite mounting debt concerns, Chinese cities have aggressively expanded subway systems beyond their fiscal capacity. Why do local officials eagerly pursue financially risky infrastructure projects that often exceed their jurisdictions’ ability to repay? Using a panel dataset of 38 Chinese cities from 2015 to 2023, the analysis employs a two-way fixed effects model to examine how prefectural Party secretaries’ investment decisions are shaped by their expected remaining tenure—the time they anticipate serving in their current post, estimated from their career history and local political patterns. The findings reveal that Party secretaries with shorter expected tenures accumulate higher fiscal burdens on the Subway Debt Index—a measure of planned subway commitment relative to city fiscal capacity—reflecting an intertemporal asymmetry in which political credit crystallizes at project initiation while debt obligations transfer to successors. Conversely, those expecting longer tenures exercise greater fiscal restraint, as they may bear the financial risks that materialize during their own term. Robustness checks using mayors’ expected tenure yield consistent directional effects. The 2017–2018 central policy tightening substantially reduced aggregate debt accumulation, and COVID-19 disruptions attenuated the tenure-debt relationship, together demonstrating how institutional constraints and exogenous shocks interact with career incentives.
Working Papers
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Seeing Like a Local State: How Intergovernmental Dynamics Produced Ottawa's Troubled LRT Development
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Announcement as Product, Stasis as Cost: Intergovernmental Friction and Infrastructure Delivery Gap in Canada
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Decoding Enforcement Logic Through Violation Discourse: Machine Learning Evidence from China's Anti-Corruption Campaign
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Measuring for Accountability: Quality-Development Evaluation and Bureaucratic Attention in China
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Institutional Inaction and Rail Infrastructure Governance on Vancouver Island
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When Rapid Delivery Fails to Sustain: Accountability Mechanisms and Infrastructure Sustainability in China’s Urban Rail Expansion
Research in Progress
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Why Long-Term Infrastructure Plans Generate Short-Term Politics: Infrastructure Governance in Canada and China
Publications in Chinese
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Political Trust and County Governments' Fiscal Capacity after the Tax-Sharing Reform: Empirical Analysis Based on Nationally Representative Sample
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The Failure of Constitutional Institution-Building and the Predicament of Political Struggle in the Early Republic of China: The Struggle between Legislative Power and Executive Power, 1911–1916
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Strong Despotic Power and Weak Infrastructural Power of the Bureaucratic System in Early Modern China: Evidence from the Liaodong Military-Fiscal Crisis in the Late Ming Dynasty