团队

This study utilizes the administrative data of an innovation grant program in a major emerging economy to study which firms are best positioned to capture the state and access resources beyond what their rule-complying merits command. We trace the grant allocation process and directly observe occurrences of rule-violating funding. We show that firms vary in capability to secure irregular awards, depending on factors such as geographic proximity and the social and bureaucratic setting within which entrepreneurs and officials interact. Furthermore, by comparing the actual allocation of irregular awards with the counterfactual scenario in which recipients were evaluated solely based on grant rules, we conclude that crony capitalism, rather than bureaucratic heroism, is the primary driver of irregular awards. Governments often use innovation grant programs to promote firm innovation, but these programs sometimes fail to achieve their objectives due to grant officials violating policy rules to provide resources to undeserving firms. We study a public funding program in a major emerging economy to analyze the bureaucratic structure and the social dynamics within which entrepreneurs and bureaucrats interact to identify the sources of state-resource misallocation. We find that geographic distance, intragovernmental checks and balances, and the lack of direct social intermediary connecting entrepreneurs with bureaucrats help reduce the likelihood of collusion for state-resource misallocation. Our results generate insights to help guide the (re)design of public funding programs, particularly in countries with low levels of transparency and public accountability.

国际知名权威学术期刊《科学》最近发布一篇由港大经管学院王砚波博士及上海交通大学史冬波博士合着的研究文章，题为「中国『青年千人计划』是否成功招募及培养顶尖科学家」。文章研究中国「千人计划」中的「青年千人计划」，在招募和培养顶尖科学家方面的成效。

There is often considerable anxiety and conflicting advice concerning the benefits of presenting/being evaluated first. We thus investigate how expert evaluators vary in their evaluations of entrepreneurial proposals based upon the order in which they are evaluated. Our research setting is a premiere innovation fund competition in Beijing, China, where the prize money at stake is economically meaningful, and evaluators are quasi-randomly assigned to evaluate written grant proposals without the possibility of peer influence. This enables us to credibly recover a causal position effect. We also theorize and test how heterogeneity in evaluators’ prior (context-specific) judging experience moderates position effects. Overall, we find that a proposal evaluated first requires total assets in the top 10th percentile to merely equal the evaluation of a proposal in the bottom 10th percentile that is not evaluated first. Firm and evaluator fixed-effects models yield consistent findings. We consider evaluation design elements that may mollify these position effects in the discussion section.

我们的研究发现有诈骗行为的公司与作风诚实正当的公司在资源分配方面迥异不同。以诈骗方式获取的资源倾向被视为不劳而获的收益，因此较少会用于投资具生产效益的活动，例如招聘人才。我们假设作风诚实正当的公司与有诈骗行为的公司会投资不同类别的创新发明：作风诚实正当的公司追求重要的技术性发明；而有诈骗行为的公司则倾向进行低价值型的投资，且避免投资具挑战性的机会，着重外观型专利的申请多于实际性发明专利的申请。我们运用跨时间段的数据验证上述假设。我们追踪了467间中国高科技公司的人才招聘及专利申请活动，而这些公司都申请了国家创新基金资助。透过比较每间公司在同一财政年度的两套财务报表，我们找出诈骗的端倪。纵使法律上要求两套财务报表必须相同，但超过一半的财务报表存在差异，而这些差异均有利于该公司。我们发现相对于作风诚实正当的公司，有诈骗行为的公司更加可能获得国家的创新基金补助，但他们很少在获得补助后招聘技术人材或进行实质性的研发活动。