“Publish More as Corruption Perishes: Anticorruption Campaigns and Scientific Research” (with Zhongyang He) (manuscript)

Abstract: Academic corruption is a challenge to the global scientific community, but little do we understand how anticorruption campaigns impact research activities. This paper argues that anticorruption campaigns can boost research output of universities that are not direct targets of the campaign. We draw evidence from more than one hundred top Chinese universities some of which were Xi Jinping's anticorruption campaign targets between 2012 and 2017. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we show a more than 10% increase in a university's paper publication after its neighbor universities in the same province are inspected, while no significant change is observed in universities under inspection. We attribute these findings to the redistribution of research resources—resulting from the anticorruption campaign—from universities directly hit by the campaign to those that are not, increasing research output of the latter. In the directly targeted universities, however, the impact of the campaign is twofold: it creates a chilling effect that increases scientists' perceived compliance risk of research activities, and it also redistributes research resources in favor of under-funded, marginally more efficient researchers. Together, these two effects cancel each other out. Our findings imply that the advancement of science benefits from a high standard of research integrity and government campaigns to cleanse corruption on campus.

Presented at MPSA 2022 and Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies 2024.