We show that judicial independence can reduce local protectionism and foster crossregional economic integration. We exploit a judicial independence reform in China with staggered roll-out since 2014. The reform removed local governments’ control over local courts’ financial and personnel decisions, thereby substantially improving local courts’ independence. Combining novel data on the universes of civil lawsuits and business registration records, we show that local defendants’ rate of winning court cases against non-local plaintiffs declined by 7.0% after the reform. The effect is mainly driven by improvements in the quality of judicial decisions and is more salient for politically connected local defendants. Over time, the reduction in local protectionism encouraged smaller non-local firms to file lawsuits against larger local firms. Using the shareholding network extracted from business registration records, we find that the decline in local protectionism could attract 8.4% more inward investment flows into reformed localities. This has the potential to increase China’s GDP by 2.3% when the judicial independence reform is implemented nationwide.

本文研究了风险投资和私募基金市场对于政府参与的需求。作者与行业领先的数据提供商合作，设计了一项可以保证被试不会作出虚假应答的大规模实地实验。在实验中，作者对市场上的双方进行了调研，包括资本投资者以及管理投资资本（将资本投资至高增长初创企业的管理投资资本）的私营公司。本文的受访者所管理的资产规模总计达近1万亿美元。在实验中，所有被试会对模拟的潜在合伙人档案进行评估并给出合作意向。模拟合伙人的所有特征都由作者基于真实分布随机生成，被试们在事前也知晓这一点。被试参与实验的唯一激励是，研究人员将基于每位被试的问卷结果所显示的偏好，为他们推荐市场中真实的潜在合伙人。本文的主要发现为，平均而言，投资公司不喜欢与政府有关联的出资方，这表明与政府作为出资方的成本相比，政治联系的好处很小。本文同时发现，国有企业并不讨厌与政府有关联的出资方，而这种厌恶在表现最好的资本管理公司中最明显。通过进一步研究和调查，本文发现，决策过程中的政治干预是导致政府资本不受欢迎的主要机制。作者们将实验结果与从工商登记数据中得到的真实匹配结果相结合，构建了一个双边的“搜索–匹配”模型，进而阐释了政府参与如何塑造市场结果。总体而言，本文的研究结果印证了政企关系中的“掠夺之手“解释，反映了政府希望保持对私营部门的控制。