Working paper · Political economy · State capacity
When Formal Authority Moves Up
Rescaling in Third-Party Regulatory Markets
What happens to a market for regulatory intermediaries when formal approval authority moves upward, while implementation still depends on decentralized actors?
This project studies a large administrative rescaling of environmental-review approval in China. It asks how moving authority from counties to prefectures changes intermediary matching, screening, processing time, and the value of locally embedded experience.
Research design
Authority moves; markets adapt.
The empirical design links changes in the level of formal approval authority to shifts in who matches with whom, how long approvals take, and which forms of intermediary experience retain value after rescaling.
The broader question is whether state capacity is produced only inside the bureaucracy, or partly through the market of outside organizations that translate formal rules into implementation.
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