Leadership in Early Life: Field Evidence from China

14:00-15:30, Friday, October 10, 2025

I-206, Boxue Building

Dr. Jindi ZHENG is an assistant professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. She obtained her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Amsterdam in 2018. Her primary research focuses on behavioral and experimental economics. Her papers have been published in journals such as Experimental Economics and Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

Sufficient human capital investment is crucial for the healthy growth of any national economy. It can be accumulated from an early stage in life. Recent evidence has shed lights on the causal relationship between leadership and skills formation (Anderson and Lu, 2016). The spillover effect of randomly assigned leadership remains unclear since leaders are usually assigned endogenously. Policy makers in education and organizations might be interested in the average effect of leadership education on academic performance, cognitive ability, social preferences, social networks, and productivity. We investigate this question in a primary school in central China, with 33 classes and 2599 students covering grade 2 to 5 (8 to 11 years old). The control group adopts the conventional way to select the class leaders -- they are designated by the teacher -- while students in the treatment group compete and rotate to be the class leaders (class monitors, vice-monitors, Task commissaries) every two weeks. Our preliminary results show that the small variation in leadership significantly increases scores in English and Science. Social preferences are not affected nor some cognitive abilities.

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