*3.3. Data*

The data in our research comes from two resources. Firstly, the firm level data of automobile manufacturing and maintenance enterprises come from the database of Chinese Industrial Enterprises from 1998 to 2007. Researches using this database usually only cover these years because the sample in this period is believed to be more valid and reasonable. After excluding samples with missing values and samples with negative values in some important enterprise characteristic variables (such as total assets, total liabilities, total profit and industrial sales value), we get a total of 44,268 observations. Secondly, the data of macroeconomic variables, which includes the total tax revenue, VAT revenue, the income tax revenue in the fiscal income of each province, the total tax revenue, VAT revenue, the income tax revenue collected by the tax authorities of each province that are all used to calculate the provincial government incentives, come from Wind database, Chinese Tax Yearbook and Chinese Fiscal Yearbook. Wind database is a large financial database in China.
