arXiv 27 Feb 2026 · Econometrics
arXiv:2603.00291 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
Upon taking office in late 2012, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched one of the most intensive anticorruption campaigns in the history of the People's Republic of China. Prior to the campaign, China's land market suffered from corruption, particularly surrounding sale method selection (auction versus listing). Listing is a two-stage sale mechanism that prior research has identified as more susceptible to corruption, leading to lower prices. This paper examines the campaign's impact on land allocation, focusing on whether corruption influences the choice of sale method and, in turn, land sale prices. This paper is the first to utilize Blackwell and Yamauchi (2021, 2024)'s marginal structural model with fixed effects in the inverse probability of treatment weighting model; absorbing time-invariant unobserved confounding and utilizing a set of time-varying covariates as controls, this model can estimate causal effects in the land sale case. I find that indictments in a prefecture cause a statistically significant drop in the probability that land is sold via listing$\unicode{x2014}$an effect that is further compounded when indictments occur in consecutive months. Sensitivity analyses indicate that any violations of the identification assumptions would bias estimates towards zero, confirming the negative effect. A second marginal structural model shows that both mean and median land sale prices increase in the presence of indictments. Together, these results suggest that the anticorruption campaign not only deterred actual corrupt allocation practices, but also impacted the discretionary use of listings.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cai, Hongbin and Henderson, J Vernon and Zhang, Qinghua China's land market auctions: evidence of corruption? | 1.000 | 13 | 3 | 100% |
| 2 | Robins, James M. and Hernán, Miguel Ángel and Brumback, Babette Marginal Structural Models and Causal Inference in Epidemiology | 0.928 | 5 | 3 | 80% |
| 3 | Thoemmes, Felix and Ong, Anthony D A Primer on Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting and Marginal Structural Models | 0.928 | 5 | 3 | 80% |
| 4 | Wu, Shuping and Yang, Zan Primary Urban Land Auctions and Land Allocation in the People’s Republic of China | 0.874 | 6 | 2 | 100% |
| 5 | Chen, Ting and Kung, James Kai-sing Busting the “Princelings”: The Campaign against Corruption in China’s Primary Land Market | 0.822 | 9 | 4 | 56% |
| 6 | Wang, Shu 中央巡视组第一轮工作收尾：7个巡视点6个查出腐败 [The first round of work of the Central Inspection Team was closed: 6 of the 7 inspection points found… | 0.811 | 5 | 2 | 80% |
| 7 | Blackwell, Matthew A Framework for Dynamic Causal Inference in Political Science | 0.737 | 3 | 3 | 67% |
| 8 | Manso, Julia Are Princelings Truly Busted? Evaluating Transaction Discounts in China's Land Market self | 0.737 | 3 | 3 | 67% |
| 9 | Gyourko, Joseph and Shen, Yang and Wu, Jing and Zhang, Rongjie Land finance in China: Analysis and review | 0.693 | 5 | 1 | 100% |
| 10 | Robins, James M Association, Causation, and Marginal Structural Models | 0.675 | 13 | 3 | 31% |
Showing the top 10 of 125 scored citations.