the equator) spanning -65° to 75° in latitude and -180° to 180° in longitude.<sup>21</sup> To derive the city-level nighttime light intensity, we first clip the DMSP-OLS nighttime lights data by China’s municipal administrative boundaries, and calculate an area-weighted average of lights across pixels within a municipality for each of our sample years.

# **3.2 Biographical database for Chinese leaders**

The data on city officials are from the China Political Elite Database (CPED), constructed by Jiang (2018) and Jiang and Zhang (2020). The database consists of more than 4,000 Chinese leaders, covering all city leaders in office since 2000 and all provincial and national leaders since the mid1990s. Information for these officials is drawn from their biographies through authoritative internet sources. For each official, the database contains basic demographic characteristics as well as the time, place, organization and rank of every job assignment listed in his curriculum vitae. We match each city-year spell in our dataset with a party secretary and a mayor. In turnover years when multiple officials held the same post, we keep the official who held the position at the end of the year. Panel B of Table 1 shows the summary statistics for the city party secretaries.<sup>22</sup> Our database contains 1,041 city PSs in office between 2000 and 2013. Among the city PSs, 130 served in more than one city (mostly two); 4.2% are female, and 6% are ethnic minorities. Their average tenure is 3.9 years, with only 25% staying in the office for more than 5 years. Their mean age when assuming office is 50.6 years old. More than 68% of them are from their native provinces, and around 7% serve in cities that are their native cities.<sup>23</sup> We define promotion and demotion significantly more comprehensively than the literature. The literature defines demotions as either being investigated for corruption or violation of the party disciplines, or being relegated based on changes in ranks. This classification fails to identify all demotions: it would, for instance, improperly categorize many demotions as lateral moves since publicly announced demotions were very rare, and only under rare circumstances do demotions take the form of a direct rank relegation (Li and Zhou 2005).<sup>24</sup> Following Aghion and Tirole (1997), and consistent with what is commonly believed among the bureaucrats and Chinese citizens, we believe

> 21 For some years two satellites collected data and thus two composites were produced, and we average these two composites.

> 22 The unit of observation used in the calculation of summary statistics for time-invariant demographic characteristics (i.e., gender and ethnicity) is the leader, while that for time-varying variables is the city-leader spell. For variables that vary across years within the city-leader spell such as age and the number of years as the party member, the summary statistics are calculated based on the year when the leader assumed office.

> 23 The curriculum vitae does not list the official’s birthplace. Rather, it shows his native province and city.

> 24 For example, Mr. Xu Jingyan, who used to be the party secretary of Liaocheng, a western prefecture-level city in Shandong Province, was appointed as the party secretary of Jinan University, a university administered by the provincial government, at the end of 2018. Although both positions are of the same rank, the transfer is publicly viewed as a demotion due to the perceived drop in power and importance.

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