Score contribution per author:
α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count
Data manipulation around cutoff points is observed in economics broadly and in environmental and resource economics in particular. This paper develops a simple and tractable censored maximum likelihood approach to quantify the degree of manipulation in China’s air pollution data around the “blue-sky day” cutoff. We construct annual measures of manipulation for 111 Chinese cities. For Beijing, we estimate 4%–16.8% of manipulation among reported blue-sky days annually, which translate to an estimated total of 208.1 manipulated blue-sky days between 2001 and 2010. For the remaining cities reporting pollution data over the 10-year period, we estimate a 93.9 average for the total number of manipulated blue-sky days with a 395.9 maximum. Using LASSO shrinkage, we examine the relationship between manipulation and local official characteristics, and find a positive correlation between manipulation and having an elite-educated party secretary, robust to numerous checks. Further empirical analysis suggests that promotion considerations may help explain this finding.