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The enforcement of public policies is a critical aspect of governance that is significantly shaped by political and institutional forces. This dissertation studies the public policy enforcement in China, which features both strong state capacity and weak rule of law. Therefore, the relationship between the central and local government is particularly important in understanding public policy enforcement in this setting. Inspired by theoretical insights and the frontier literature in political economy and development economics, I employ reduced-form empirical methods to evaluate key features in China’s public policy enforcement. The three chapters of my dissertation discuss three different modes of public policy enforcements in China, each featuring varying roles of the central and local governments. The findings in this dissertation shed light on the complex dynamics of policy enforcement in China’s unique political and institutional context and have important implications for policymakers seeking to improve the effectiveness of governance. Although the chapters are ordered to highlight the most important work from my doctoral study as Chapter 1, I would like to introduce the contents of each chapter in reverse order, beginning with Chapter 3 and ending with Chapter 1. The introduction starts with a discussion of the simplest mode of public policy enforcement, in which the central government dictates and vertically implements the policy, in Chapter 3. Moving to Chapter 2, the discussion explores the issue of incentives for local government officials, adding complexity to the enforcement model. Finally, in Chapter 1, the conflict between overlapping government hierarchies is analyzed. Overall, this dissertation presents a comprehensive examination of the challenges involved in public policy enforcement, with a focus on the role of government officials at different levels of the hierarchy.Chapter 3 of this dissertation, which was co-authored with Chang Liu and Li-An Zhou and published in the Journal of Comparative Economics in 2020, evaluates the Universal Salt Iodization (USI) policy implemented in China in 1994. As the largest nutrition intervention policy in human history, the USI policy aimed to eliminate iodine deficiency diseases that could cause severe consequences on the cognitive abilities of future generations. Due to the central government's monopoly on salt production, distribution, and retail, the policy was effectively enforced vertically. To evaluate the policy's impact on children's later-life educational outcomes, we employed a difference-in-differences strategy to compare the educational outcomes of cohorts born before and after USI across counties with different iodine deficiency disorder levels based on population census data combined with county-level information. Our results demonstrate that the USI policy increased primary school enrollment by 0.6 percentage points and was more beneficial for girls and children born in rural areas. These findings further highlight the efficacy of public policies when enforced vertically by the central government. Chapter 2 is coauthored with Qianmiao Chen, Chang Liu, and Peng Wang, and published in the European Journal of Political in 2022. This chapter examines a more prevalent model of policy enforcement in China, where the central government sets general policy targets, and local governments have considerable discretion in their implementation. We use Chinese governments’ crisis response to the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of such a model and investigate the role of local government leader’ career incentives in determining city-wide lockdown measures. At the onset of the pandemic, most local leaders hesitated to impose lockdowns as their promotions depended on achieving strong numbers for economic growth in their regions, which could be suppressed by such measures. However, when the nation’s top leader warned that local leaders who failed to control the disease would be removed from office, many rapidly implemented resolute measures. Nonetheless, our analysis reveals that local leaders with stronger promotion incentives were still more likely to downplay the virus by avoiding or minimizing lockdowns. The findings underscore how local politicians may be incentivized to act slowly during crises, undermining the central government's objectives in critical public policies. Chapter 1 examines a complex scenario in which policy enforcement is limited by the conflict between overlapping government hierarchies, constraining the local governments’ ability in effective policy enforcement, even if they have strong incentives. To illustrate this point, I document a real-world example that Chinese central and provincial state-owned enterprises (SOEs) were exempted from local environmental regulations due to an institutional barrier. This exemption pushed local regulators to impose more stringent regulations on private firms. Using rich firm-level panel data and exploiting the decentralization of Chinese central and provincial SOEs, I investigate the direct and spillover effects of removing this regulatory constraint. The results show that polluting SOEs invest more in pollution abatement inputs that do not contribute directly to production, pollutes less, and have lower productivity when decentralized to the prefectural level. Furthermore, private firms in the same prefecture pollute more while increasing output and TFP, especially those with more binding financial constraints. At the aggregate level, decentralizing polluting SOEs in a prefecture reduces total emissions without significantly affecting total industrial output or aggregate productivity. When hypothetically reallocating 10% of emissions from central and provincial SOEs to private firms, I calculate total industrial output gains of 0.74–3.31%. This chapter highlights the significance of institutional interactions, particularly between central and local governments' policy targets, in shaping policy outcomes.

Understanding the response of biomass allocation in current-year twigs is crucial for elucidating the plant life-history strategies under heterogeneous volcanic habitats. We aimed to test whether twig biomass allocation, within-leaf biomass allocation, and the size-number trade-off of Betula platyphylla would be influenced. We measured twig traits of B. platyphylla in Wudalianchi volcanic kipuka, the lava platform, and Shankou lake in northeastern China using standardized major axis analyses. The results showed that the leaf number, total lamina mass (TLAM), stem mass (SM), and twig mass (TM) were significantly different between the three habitats and were greatest in kipuka with abundant soil nutrients. TLAM and SM scaled allometrically with respect to TM, while the normalization constants of the lava platform differ significantly between kipuka and Shankou lake, which showed that under certain TM, leaves gain more biomass in the lava platform. However, within the leaf, individual lamina mass (ILM) scaled isometrically with respect to individual petiole mass (IPM) in kipuka and the lava platform, but ILM scaled allometrically to IPM in Shankou lake. Our results indicated that inhabitats influenced the twig traits and biomass allocation and within-leaf biomass allocation are strategies for plants to adapt to volcanic heterogeneous habitats.

The relationship between the fungal community characteristics and soil environmental factors of volcanic ecosystem in Wudalianchi, China were investigated. The soil fungal community structure and diversity of new, old, and non-erupting volcanos were explored through highthroughput sequencing technology. The result showed that the physical and chemical properties of three plots were significantly different. Through sequencing 578 species, 366 genera, 202 families, 89 orders, 32 classes, and 11 phyla were detected. Among them Ascomycota and Basidiomycota were the dominant fungi phyla. The relative abundance of various flora determined by phylum classification showed significant differences. The Shannon, Simpson, Ace, and Chao1 indices for the soil fungi in the three plots were also significantly different. Redundancy and correlation analyses showed that the α diversity of fungi was significantly correlated with pH, organic matter and total nitrogen in the soil. These results indicate that soil environmental factors influence the fungal diversity in the different volcanic ecosystems in Wudalianchi, China. Bangladesh J. Bot. 50(2): 327-334, 2021 (June)

Background Some ferns have medicinal properties and are used in therapeutic interventions. However, the classification and phylogenetic relationships of ferns remain incompletely reported. Considering that chloroplast genomes provide ideal information for species identification and evolution, in this study, three unpublished and one published ferns were sequenced and compared with other ferns to obtain comprehensive information on their classification and evolution. Materials and Methods The complete chloroplast genomes of Dryopteris goeringiana (Kunze) Koidz, D. crassirhizoma Nakai, Athyrium brevifrons Nakai ex Kitagawa, and Polystichum tripteron (Kunze) Presl were sequenced using the Illumina HiSeq 4,000 platform. Simple sequence repeats (SSRs), nucleotide diversity analysis, and RNA editing were investigated in all four species. Genome comparison and inverted repeats (IR) boundary expansion and contraction analyses were also performed. The relationships among the ferns were studied by phylogenetic analysis based on the whole chloroplast genomes. Results The whole chloroplast genomes ranged from 148,539 to 151,341 bp in size and exhibited typical quadripartite structures. Ten highly variable loci with parsimony informative (Pi) values of > 0.02 were identified. A total of 75–108 SSRs were identified, and only six SSRs were present in all four ferns. The SSRs contained a higher number of A + T than G + C bases. C‐to‐U conversion was the most common type of RNA editing event. Genome comparison analysis revealed that single‐copy regions were more highly conserved than IR regions. IR boundary expansion and contraction varied among the four ferns. Phylogenetic analysis showed that species in the same genus tended to cluster together with and had relatively close relationships. Conclusion The results provide valuable information on fern chloroplast genomes that will be useful to identify and classify ferns, and study their phylogenetic relationships and evolution., Study reported three newly sequenced chloroplast genomes of ferns.Study provided more information on understanding evolution and phylogenetic of ferns.