Abstract
Do network connections between government officials and administrative units facilitate efficient land use contracting across jurisdictions? This paper leverages data from a ground-breaking policy in China where a strict quota-bound land use policy was replaced by an alternative permitting between-county trade in land conversion quotas. We unpack the determinants of the boundary between trading and autarkic jurisdictions, and unveil leader-related drivers of transaction costs between jurisdictions in a gravity-style estimation. We catalogue entire personal and career histories of county-level leaders, and present evidence that leader networks derived from employment history are robustly trade facilitating but non-workplace links are not.