團隊

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.

國際知名權威學術期刊《科學》最近發布一篇由港大經管學院王硯波博士及上海交通大學史冬波博士合著的研究文章，題為「中國『青年千人計劃』是否成功招募及培養頂尖科學家」。文章研究中國「千人計劃」中的「青年千人計劃」，在招募和培養頂尖科學家方面的成效。

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.

我們的研究發現有詐騙行為的公司與作風誠實正當的公司在資源分配方面迥異不同。以詐騙方式獲取的資源傾向被視為不勞而獲的收益，因此較少會用於投資具生產效益的活動，例如招聘人才。我們假設作風誠實正當的公司與有詐騙行為的公司會投資不同類別的創新發明：作風誠實正當的公司追求重要的技術性發明；而有詐騙行為的公司則傾向進行低价值型的投資，且避免投資具挑戰性的機會，著重外觀型专利的申请多於實際性發明专利的申请。我們運用跨时间段的数据驗證上述假設。我們追蹤了467間中國高科技公司的人才招聘及專利申請活動，而這些公司都申請了國家創新基金資助。透過比較每間公司在同一財政年度的兩套財務報表，我們找出詐騙的端倪。縱使法律上要求兩套財務報表必須相同，但超過一半的財務報表存在差異，而這些差異均有利於該公司。我們發現相對於作風誠實正當的公司，有詐騙行為的公司更加可能獲得國家的创新基金補助，但他们很少在獲得補助後招聘技术人材或進行实质性的研發活动。