讲座题目：Early-life Famine Experience, Trade-offs Among Local Governance Goals, and Regional Environmental Performance
主讲嘉宾：白彩全教授
主持人：吴小芳教授
讲座时间：2025年10月11日（周六）9：30
讲座地点：文泉楼南207会议室
内容概要：
Frontier research has increasingly emphasized the role of officials’ behavior in determining local environmental governance. However, the impact of officials’ early-life experiences on their environmental policy preferences remains underexplored. Based on the biographical data of 1735 prefecture-level city mayors and city statistical data from 332 prefecture-level cities between 2002 and 2021, this paper investigates how officials’ early-life experiences during the Great Famine influenced their subsequent policy preferences regarding environmental governance. The results reveal that the severity of the famine experienced in their childhood is significantly and negatively associated with the environmental governance level of the cities they govern. This effect is particularly evident among mayors who were between the ages of 7 and 12 during the Great Famine. In order to further explore the reason of this phenomenon, we examine how their early-life famine experiences affected their trade-offs among the main local governance goals. The results suggest that this experience leads mayors to prioritize people’s livelihood and economic development over environmental concerns when making policy decisions. Furthermore, the statistical correlation between experiences of the Great Famine and subjective perceptions of environmental, livelihood, and economic issues highlights the psychological mechanisms underlying the enduring impact of early-life trauma on officials’ preferences regarding governance in these areas. We also find that, at least in the field of environmental governance, the impact of early famine experience on mayors’ policy preferences is more significant than that on municipal party secretaries.
专家简介：
白彩全，经济学博士，湘潭大学商禁漫天堂 教授、博士生导师，主要从事环境经济学、发展经济学、绿色金融、经济史等领域的研究。近年来，在《经济研究》、《管理世界》、《经济学（季刊）》、《世界经济》、Journal of Development Economics、Journal of Corporate Finance、Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control、Journal of International Money and Finance、Business History等中英文期刊发表论文50余篇，主持国家自然科学基金青年项目、山东省社会科学规划重大委托项目、山东省自然科学基金青年项目等项目多项。担任SSCI期刊Managerial and Decision Economics的副主编（Associate Editor），并担任60余本SSCI、SCI和CSSCI期刊的匿名审稿人。