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Dean Knox (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Identifying Peer Effects under Homophily with an Instrumental Variable: Patronage and Promotion in the Chinese Bureaucracy
Citation:
Knox's poster is impressive on several levels. First, to undertake his analysis, he has gathered---mostly via web-scraping---an extraordinarily rich data set on the relationship between Chinese local officials: including their educational backgrounds and histories in various positions. His primary concern is whether individuals are promoted within the bureaucracy due to their pre-existing connections to others that hold senior posts, or whether in fact, such career patterns can be explained by the less worrying notion of homophily: i.e. that similar people end up doing similar things due to their underlying preferences and latent types. This is, of course, a classical problem in network analysis. He suggests a clever design that relies on retirements---and thus empty slots into which individuals may be promoted---and that uses randomization inference to asses the relative contribution of network effects. Ultimately, he finds that being part of more prestigious networks causes mayors to have a greater probability of promotion. We found this to be a thoughtful, careful and interesting poster on a fascinating topic, supported by data that will bear fruit for both him and political science as a whole in the future. He richly deserves this award.