Social fragmentation, public goods, and local elections: evidence from China

Gerard Padró i Miquel is a professor of economics and political science at Yale University, where he is also the director of the Leitner Program of International and Comparative Political Economy. He is interested in the interplay between politics and economics as a barrier for development with a focus on civil conflict and on the politics of non-democratic regimes. His previous work has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies and Quarterly Journal of Political Science, among others.

Nancy Qian is the James J. O’Connor Professor at Kellogg MEDS of Northwestern University and the founding director of China Lab, a part of Northwestern’s Global Poverty Research Lab. She is a native of Shanghai, China, and holds a PhD in economics from MIT. Prior to Kellogg, Professor Qian taught at Yale University and Brown University, and was a postdoctoral fellow on the prestigious Harvard Academy Scholars programme. Her research provides empirical evidence for a set of core questions in development economics that broadly fall into four subcategories: demography and development, geography and development, institutions and development, and culture and development.

Yang Yao is a Chinese economist, academic, and author. He is a professor, director of the China Center for Economic Research, and dean of National School of Development at Peking University. He is the executive director of the Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development and is an editor of China Economic Quarterly.