This paper theoretically and empirically investigates factional arrangements within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the governing political party of the People's Republic of China. Using detailed biographical information of political elites in the Central Committee and provincial governments, we present a set of new empirical regularities within the CCP, including systematic patterns of cross‐factional balancing at different levels of the political hierarchy and substantial faction premia in promotions. We propose and estimate an organizational economic model to characterize factional politics within single‐party nondemocratic regimes and its economic implications.

Tests based on the quantile regression process can be formulated like the classical Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Cramer-von-Mises tests of goodness-of-t employing the theory of Bessel processes as in Kiefer (1959). However, it is fre-quently desirable to formulate hypotheses involving unknown nuisance parameters, thereby jeopardizing the distribution free character of these tests. We characterize this situation as \ he Durbin problem " since it was posed in Durbin (1973), for parametric empirical processes. In this paper we consider an approach to the Durbin problem involving a mar-tingale transformation of the parametric empirical process suggested by Khmaladze (1981) and show that it can be adapted to a wide variety of inference problems involving the quantile regression process. In particular, we suggest new tests of the location shift and location-scale shift models that underlie much of classical econometric inference. The methods are illustrated with a reanalysis of data on unemployment durations from the Pennsylvania Reemployment Bonus Experiments. The Pennsylvania ex-periments, conducted in 1988-89, were designed to test the ecacy of cash bonuses paid for early reemployment in shortening the duration of insured unemployment spells. 1.