The birthplace cultural tightness of provincial party secretaries and innovation in their jurisdictions: Empirical evidence from 31 provinces in China

While the Chinese government has played an important role in China’s tremendous progress in innovation, and provincial party secretaries serve as the main body of regional management, less is known about how the key characteristics of these key leaders play a role in promoting innovation development. From the perspective of cultural tightness, we use patent data for 31 Chinese provinces from 2000 to 2019 to explore the impact of cultural tightness of provincial party secretaries’ birthplaces in influencing innovation in their jurisdictions. Drawing on upper echelons theory and imprinting theory, we find that party secretaries born in provinces with higher cultural tightness promote innovation more in their jurisdictions, but this effect is prominent only for incremental innovation, not for radical innovation. The potential underlying mechanism is that party secretaries with high birthplace cultural tightness (BCT) tend to invest more in infrastructure construction and thus enhance incremental innovation. In addition, the positive relationship between BCT of provincial party secretaries and the innovation in their jurisdictions is weaker when the jurisdiction is more market-oriented but becomes stronger as the tenure of the provincial party secretary increases. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications of these findings are discussed. JEL Classification: M0, M2