Terrain ruggedness and limits of political repression: Evidence from China’s Great Leap Forward and Famine (1959-61)

Chairman Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward development plan strongly affected food security in rural China at the time, given that many of the associated policies exploited rural labor and extracted resources. A few months after the plan’s initial implementation in August 1958, food shortages were reported; by the spring of 1961, more than 30 million citizens had died of starvation and famine-related illnesses. However, as the national plan was rolled out and then upheld over three years, on-the-ground implementation was nonuniform. Using georeferenced terrain ruggedness data which captures small-scale topological irregularities and information on provincial leadership attitudes towards Mao’s plan, I provide evidence on forces underlying the famine’s intensity and distribution. The analysis is based on a differential effect, in which a fear-based incentive structure characterizing the plan’s implementation is implicitly embedded. The baseline results indicate that rugged terrain protected more than 4.6 million rural Chinese from dying in the famine. By identifying an additional benefit of ruggedness to health and well-being in some rural communities, I show that not only does a causal relationship exist at a local level between Great Leap policies and famine mortality, but also that the lethality of the policies varied per state power at the time.     

Long-term impact of trade liberalization on human capital formation

While a growing line of research has assessed the effect of trade liberalization on human capital formation, most of these studies focus on its short-term effect on individual’s school attendance. Much less is known about its long-run effect, as well as the impact on other aspects of human capital formation such as labor market and noncognitive outcomes. This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization on individuals’ long-term human capital accumulation, including school attendance, cognitive abilities, labor market performance, and noncognitive outcomes. By constructing prefecture-year-level tariff barriers, our identification strategy exploits variations in different cohorts’ exposure to a trade shock at age 16 for individuals within the same prefecture. Empirical results suggest that trade liberalization leads to decreased completed years of schooling, cognitive abilities, wage, and noncognitive outcomes. We provide suggestive evidence that this observed pattern is explained by the expansion of job opportunities in relatively low-skilled and labor-intensive sectors.     

Composing tweets to increase retweets

Brands tweet not only to communicate with followers but also to reach large audiences rapidly when the tweets are retweeted by the followers. People however will retweet only if they recognize within a few seconds that the tweet is on an interesting topic. Brands therefore need insights into how to compose tweets to facilitate topic recognition even when they are just scanned. This is the issue that we address in this research. Specifically, drawing on findings in psycholinguistics, we empirically investigate if tweets composed such that they include more topic-related words that are located closer to the start get more retweets. Results from an investigation of sales-promotional tweets by sixty brands in four categories indicate that tweets that are composed as above do get more retweets. We repeat the investigation using tweets on several other topics from a natural experiment that generated pairs of tweets where each pair is on the same topic but each tweet in the pair is composed differently. This investigation reconfirms the findings from the analysis of retweets of sales-promotional tweets. We conclude by presenting an approach for how social media managers can compose tweets based on our findings.     

The impact of knowledge hiding on targets’ knowledge sharing with perpetrators

Using a sequential mixed-methods approach, this study explored how knowledge hiding (KH) targets react to perpetrators in the hospitality industry. Study 1 entailed in-depth interviews of 20 employees from 13 hotels. Findings indicate that KH influences knowledge transfer behavior through negative emotions. Moreover, individual personality and motivation, team and interpersonal factors, job characteristics, and KH characteristics can moderate this effect. In Studies 2 (n = 54) and 3 (n = 118), two scenario-based experiments reveal that KH negatively affects targets’ knowledge sharing (KS) with perpetrators directly and indirectly through negative emotions. In Study 4, the results of a survey from 475 employees indicate that when the need for affiliation of employees and task interdependence is high, the negative effect of negative emotions on KS with perpetrators is weaker. This study advances the literature on KH by offering a sound theoretical treatment of emotional concerns and the interaction between knowledge seekers and knowledge hiders.     

我国企业集团化与企业绩效关系实证研究

企业集团化是指企业之间通过股权与其他方式的联结,组建企业集团的行为。作为一种在我国改革开放后新出现的组织形式,企业集团引起了我国众多学者的研究兴趣。本文主要选取在沪、深两地上市的制造业企业作为研究样本,对我国企业集团化与企业绩效的关系进行了实证研究。     

A woman's place is in the… startup! Crowdfunder judgments,implicit bias,and the stereotype content model

We examine investor stereotypes and implicit bias in crowdfunding decisions. Prior research in formal venture capital settings demonstrates that investors tend to have a funding bias against women. However, in crowdfunding – wherein a ‘crowd’ of amateur investors make relatively small investments in new companies – our empirical observations reveal a funding advantage for women. We explain the causal mechanism underlying this counterintuitive finding by drawing upon stereotype content theory and testing a dual path moderated-mediation model. Based on archival data and a follow-up experiment, our findings suggest common gender biases held by amateur investors function to increase female stereotype perceptions in the form of trustworthiness judgments, which subsequently increases investors' willingness to invest in early-stage women-led ventures. We discuss our results with specific attention to how our findings extend the entrepreneurship funding literature as well as the gender dynamics literature in entrepreneurship and organization research more broadly.