China’s Young Talents Programs. How do returnees perform?

China has launched a series of talent-recruitment policies in the last years, in order to attract back Chinese nationals who stayed abroad. Yet, little is known about the effect of such policies. This webinar will ask the question of whether researchers recruited in one of the Chinese flagship talent-recruitment policies – the “Young Thousand Talents” policy (Y1000T) – had, in the following years after recruitment, better research performance. We compare these recipients against other Chinese nationals who got PhDs in equally prestigious non-Chinese universities but continued to work abroad (mostly in the US). Results of difference- in-differences regressions show that after coming back to China, Y1000T returnees have significantly increased their productivity in terms of the number of outputs, arguably because of their favourable research conditions. In addition, returning to China has an effect of positioning returnees both at the bottom and at the very summit of the distribution of quality of publications. Nevertheless, some Y1000T researchers seem to have prioritized the quantity of outputs, arguably to the detriment of quality. This is probably due to certain research evaluation criteria in place until recent times.