legal_censorship
Background
China started publishing the universe of court verdicts as part of their legal reform since 2013. This endeavor is widely acknowledged as a cruicial step towards legal transparency, justice, and government accountability. However, starting from 2021, the government seems to be intentionally rolling back the commitment. Not only do we observe a huge dip in the total # of published verdicts, we also observe a considerable number of cases where previous court verdicts have been retracted. Out of the 80 million civil lawsuits published, over 2.5 million are retracted from the official website.
Research question:
We're interested in understanding this unique phenomenon of legal censorship. Specifically,
- What kind of legal documents got censored?
- Why does local courts / government have the incentive to censor?
- What's the economic impact of such censorship?
Roadmap:
Main section 1: Predictors of legal censorship
- Main assumption: Connections, fiscal revenue and investment
- First cut: Local vs. Non-local firms;
- State-owned enterprises vs. private companies;
- We could also measure firm-to-province connection by previous government investments;
- For the subset of listed firms, we may follow CLFPD's strategy to measure annual level board of directors' political connection.
- Court cases that involves firms that contributes to a larger share of local fiscal revenue are more likely to get censored.
- Other explanatory factors:
- "Politically sensitive" keywords
- Social unrest
- National security and international relations
Main section 2: Incentives to censor
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Firm-level regression: Did court verdict removal help those firms attract more investment?
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More contracts with SOEs
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More investments from PEs
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Heterogeneity on # of previous cases
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Heterogeneity on type of court cases
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- County-level regression: Did counties with higher court-verdict removal rates attract more investment / fiscal revenue (or its first derivative)?
- Or maybe it's just a zero-sum game, and legal censorship merely re-allocates the investment within the pool.
- Other miscellaneous incentives: Judge / Court level promotion?