政策不确定性与私营企业家时间再分配

Policy Uncertainty and Time Redistribution of Chinese Private Entrepreneurs

处于转型期的中国,财政分权体制决定了中央政府在政治上集权,但在经济上实行地方分权制,市委书记作为地方"一把手",其更替换届给微观企业外部营商环境带来改变,产生一定的政策不确定性。本文采用2002-2010年中国市委书记更替数据、私营企业调查数据,实证检验了发生官员更替时企业家时间配置的变动,研究发现市委书记更替,特别是当年的更替,显著降低了企业家"外出联系生意、开会及公关、招待"、"日常经营管理"的时间;进一步地,市委书记更替显著增加了企业家社交活动的经济成本。这表明,官员更替带来的营商环境变动,使企业家的行为更为谨慎,同时他们也需要付出更多的成本来抵冲政策不确定性的潜在影响,可在一定程度上减少企业家的寻租活动。

Currently in a transitional period, China enjoys political centralization and economic decentralization with its fiscal decentralization system. As the "top leader" of local government,a municipal party secretary can bring a strong exogenous shock on the business environment for local enterprises with periodic turnover. Using a dataset of local government leadership turnover and pooled survey datasets of Chinese private enterprises from the year 2002 to 2010, we study the time redistribution of entrepreneurs affected by the turnover of local government officials.We propose three measures of policy uncertainty, i.e. whether the official is changing, term limits and rotation of Chinese governors. Based on these measures, our empirical analyses show that the policy uncertainty brought by the turnover of government officials significantly lower the time for social activities and daily management, with increased economic costs for such activities. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurs become more cautious as the local business environment changes due to government leadership turnovers, and pay more costs to deal with the potential effects caused by policy uncertainty, thereby reducing their rent-seeking behaviors.