| Summary: | The field of political connections and corporate governance is not a novelty per se. I am
indebted to an extensive literature (Cohen et al., 2008; Faccio et al., 2006; Fisman, 2001).
I measure connections to the political elite -the 25 top members of the Chinese Politburorelying on past educational links of the directors or CEOs. Several scholars have used
similar proxies of connections in the United States (Do et al., 2016; Engelberg et al., 2012;
Faleye et al., 2014; Fracassi and Tate, 2012; Hwang and Kim, 2009), in France (Nguyen,
2012), or in Korea (Schoenherr, 2019). The educational proxy had not been explored in
China in the context of corporate governance research.
Thus, I revisit the relationship between connections and corporate governance, focusing
on connections to the elite. The elite is composed in the three essays by the 25 political
leaders in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a huge organization with more than
90 million members. The elite can ease access to key resources, block agreements, or
assure job placements in an exchange of power and money. In a country like China, where
economic growth has been the trend in the past decades, political elites have both career
and financial incentives to encourage these exchange of resources (Ang, 2020). China
provides me with the data and institutional setting to study the role of connections to the
political elite.
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