“Bureaucratic Integration and Business Cycle Synchronization” by Junyi Liu

Junyi Liu is an assistant professor of economics who teaches courses in macroeconomics, international economics, principle of economics, introduction to Pacific Basin, and development economics. His research interests include economic development (Chinese economy), public health, international economics, and political economy.

The main objective is to investigate the impact of the political personnel system on business cycle synchronization in China. 

Extensive research has been done on the relationship between political factors and economic performance (Frey and Lau, 1968; Rogoff and Sibert, 1988; Vergne, 2009, Cerqueira and Martins, 2011) as well as on business cycle synchronization (Mundell, 1961; McKinnon, 1963; Alesina et al., 2002; Bergman, 2006; and Kalemli-Ozcan et al., 2013). Nonetheless, an important and yet insufficiently studied issue—political influence on the synchronization of economic activity, remains unresolved. Among many obstacles blocking the investigation of political impacts on business cycle synchronization, the fact that political systems differ substantively across countries and identifying variations in political institutions across countries is an arduous task, may be the main one. Hence, regional studies under similar political and legal systems that can yield accurate estimations are desirable (Clark and Wincoop, 2001; He et al., 2017). In this study, we fill in the gap by exploring the channels through which bureaucratic system affects output synchronization using cross-regional data of China.