Purpose: This paper aims to measure the operating efficiency of China’s basic pension insurance from 2014 to 2019 in 31 provinces. Methods: The three-stage DEA model was used to evaluate the operating efficiency of basic pension insurance in 31 provinces. Results: On the whole, the operating efficiency of China’s basic pension insurance was at a high level, but there was still room for improvement. GDP, urbanization level and scale of government public expenditure had a positive impact on the operating efficiency of regional basic pension insurance. In contrast, the old-age dependency ratio had a significant negative effect. There were noticeable regional differences in the operating efficiency of China’s basic pension insurance, which showed a pattern of Central (0.742) >Eastern (0.689) >Western (0.505) after removing the influence of environmental variables. Conclusion: This study systematically analyzes the impact of external environmental regulations on China’s basic pension insurance’s operating efficiency and provides decision-making references for further improving the operating efficiency of China’s basic pension insurance. In order to further optimize the allocation of basic endowment insurance, this paper proposes the following countermeasures and suggestions: (1) broaden investment channels and improve the investment efficiency; (2) increase supervision of social security departments and strengthen information disclosure; (3) unify the management of social basic pension insurance.

Objectives: Based on incentive theory of motivation, this paper aims to estimate China's basic pension insurance's annual efficiency and inter-period efficiency changes from 2015 to 2019 and further examine the relationship between official tenure and basic pension insurance governance performance.Methods: The DEA—BCC model was used to evaluate the operating efficiency of basic pension insurance in 31 provinces of China. And four panel Tobit models were constructed to examine the heterogeneous linkages between officials' tenure and governance efficiency in different regions of China.Results: The results showed that there was an inverted U-shaped relationship between the official tenure and the governance efficiency of basic pension insurance. The younger an official was in his current position, the more apparent the inverted U-shaped relationship between the tenure of an official and the governance efficiency of basic pension insurance. We also found that localized government officials showed better governance efficiency of basic pension insurance. However, as the term of office of officials increased, the governance efficiency of non-localized officials showed a steeper negative effect.Conclusion: This study firstly reveals a significant relationship between the characteristics of officials and the operation of China's basic pension insurance system, which is a complement to the study of China's basic pension systems.

We investigate whether financing constraints affect the size distribution of Chinese industrial firms from 1998 to 2007. Although the firm size distribution does not follow Zipf distribution in China, it is approaching Zipf distribution over time. In general, financing constraints have a robustly negative effect on the size distribution of firms. Furthermore, firms in Western China grow significantly more equally after controlling for financing constraints. However, the effect of financing constraints in Central China is significantly negative, and the effect of financing constraints on firm size distribution in Eastern China is insignificant. We thus expect a non-linear relationship between financing constraints and firm size distribution.