【Brownbag】Year-End Rush and Career Concern: Theory and Evidence from Chinese Patent Applications
2025/02/14
研討會日期 : 2025-02-14
時間 : 12:10
主講人 : Professor Kong-Pin Chen (陳恭平)
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Professor Kong-Pin Chen received his Ph.D. in Economics from Rochester University in 1993. He is currently a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica. His research fields are Law and Economics, Labor Economics, Industrial Organization, Empirical Legal Studies, and Digital Economics.
演講摘要 : This paper proposes a theory of the year-end rush, a phenomenon that is also often referred to as the "fourth-quarter effect", which records a year-end surge of investments or activities commonly observed in organizations. The theory shows that in a multi-period tournament in which interim performances are observable, the contestants who lag behind in the penultimate period will be more aggressive in the last period to catch up. More importantly, to alleviate this aggressive response, the contestants purposely set an effort level lower in the early periods than in the last, a result we interpret as the year-end rush. Since the promotion of Chinese officials in the bureaucratic hierarchy is well-known to be a tournament, to empirically support this theory, we use the data of patent applications in China (1985-2019) to show that (i) there is substantial year-end rush of patent applications across all Chinese cities, and (ii) the extent of a city's year-end surge exhibits a strong and significant positive relation with its rank-order in interim performance within the province it belongs to. China's policy of patent growth target has been widely criticized for resulting in this year-end rush, which brings down patent quality. We show that the underlying cause of year-end rush is not growth target, but career concern as induced by tournament between the local officials, and growth target only exacerbates it. We also provide evidence that the local governments enlist patent agency to help with patent rush.
