报告题目：Year-End Rush and Career Tournament: Theory and Evidences from Chinese Patent Applications
报告人：陈恭平
时间：5月15日（周四）下午14:30
地点：中国西部科技创新港涵英楼8121会议室
报告人简介：
陈恭平，美国罗彻斯特大学经济学博士，中国台湾地区中研院经济研究所特聘研究员。研究领域为微观经济学、产业经济学、博弈论等。在Journal of Labor Economics、Journal of Industrial Economics、International Economic Review、Rand Journal of Economics、Games and Economic Behavior、Journal of Economic Theory、Journal of Law, Economics & Organization等国际权威期刊发表论文几十篇。曾担任亚洲法律经济学会（Asian Law and Economics Association）会长，Asian Journal of Law and Economics等多家期刊的主编或编委，以及Review of Economic Studies、Journal of Public Economics、Journal of Labor Economics等40余家顶级期刊的评审人。曾在大英科学院、巴黎高等社会米兰（中国）学院等学术机构做访问学者，曾担任美国杜克大学、中国台湾大学等高校的合聘教授或客座教授。曾获得吴大猷纪念奖。
报告摘要：
This paper proposes a theory of the year-end rush (also referred to as the “fourth-quarter effect”), the year-end surge of investments or activities prevalent in organizations. In a multi-period tournament with observable interim performances, the contestants who lag behind will be more aggressive in catching up than their opponents in the latter period. Since the last period is not subject to subsequent catching up effort, the marginal return on effort, and its level, is greatest in the last period, which causes an end-of-period surge in effort. Moreover, there is a monotonically increasing relationship between a contestant’s interim performance and the extent of his year-end rush. Since the promotion of Chinese officials in the bureaucratic hierarchy is well-known to be a tournament, we use data for patent applications in Chinese cities to empirically test the theory. We show that the underlying cause of the year-end rush is the tournament between local officials; the growth target policy only exacerbates it. The evidence also shows that patent agencies play an important role in the patent rush.
经金学院
2025年5月12日
