阿克洛夫和森提出了身份认同及身份选择假说,强调身份是一种社会规范,影响人的行为。本文从籍贯的视角把省级官员的家乡身份与地级市相匹配,识别在任省级官员的家乡身份认同对家乡经济增长的影响及其在家乡身份和职务身份之间的选择,检验阿克洛夫和森的理论假说。对于地级市而言,是否拥有省级官员老乡是外生的,本文采用倍差法估计发现,平均而言,省级官员的家乡身份认同在2001—2010年促进了家乡经济增长约0.6个百分点;当其职务身份与家乡身份在空间上重合时,省级官员将选择职务身份,家乡身份认同效应消失。这些实证发现是稳健的,证实了阿克洛夫和森的理论假说,揭示了身份选择和身份认同等文化因素是影响经济发展的深层次因素。
In this paper we aim to test the hypothesis that identity can constrain behavior with prescriptions,which was recently put forward by Akerlof and Sen.Based on a new dataset matching 283 prefectural cities with exogenous hometowns of provincial leaders.We conduct difference-in-differences estimation,and find that in average the provincial leaders in the first decade of 21 st century significantly increase the growth rate of hometown's economy by0.6percent.We also find that effects of hometown identity on hometown's economic growth disappear when provincial leaders are confronted with balance between hometown identity and career identity.These findings are robust,and are partly coincide with predicts from Akerlof and Sen's hypothesis.