经济与社会研究院SEMINAR第9期

题目：To Build Outward or Upward：The Spatial Pattern of Urban Land Development in China

报告人：北京大学 张庆华

时间：2016年9月12日下午13:30-15:00

地点：暨南大学经济学院楼106B

主办方：暨南大学经济与社会研究院

报告人简介：

张庆华，北京大学光华管理学院应用经济系副教授，博士生导师。本科就读于武汉大学经济学院世界经济系，后在美国布朗大学获得经济学博士学位。曾就职于美国德克萨斯州立大学奥斯汀分校，任访问助理教授。2004年秋加入北京大学光华管理学院。2004-2006年曾担任世界银行短期经济顾问。张庆华博士的主要研究领域包括城市经济学、公共财政、搜索与匹配以及应用计量经济学。她的多篇论文发表在Review of Economics and Statistics, Rand Journal of Economics, Journal of Urabn Economics以及Journal of Economerics 等国际权威学术期刊上。

张庆华

Abstract:

This paper attempts to understand the patterns of urban land development in China from the political economy perspective. Our study is motivated by an interesting pattern observed in the past decade that in the initially more densely populated cities the urban land development was expanded more outwardly with a relatively low use intensity. We link this pattern with the career concerns of Chinese city leaders who pursue faster GDP growth and generate more fiscal revenues by expanding the city outwardly. We first develop a theoretical model to demonstrate how a city leader with career concerns chooses the spatial pattern of urban land development and derive several testable predications. First, city leaders with high career incentives are more likely to expand the city outward. The underlying mechanism that drives this is that by doing so the city leader can generate more land sale revenues for financing public infrastructure, which in turn enhances the economic performance and her career prospect. Secondly, the average use intensity of newly developed land is lower for city leaders with higher career incentive due to the existence of a mechanical　trade-off between a city’s upward and outward expansion. Then we test these theoretical predictions using a large dataset on residential land transactions from 2000 to 2012 which are matched with the personal characteristics of city leaders during the same time period. We find robust evidence consistent with the predictions of our model.Our study highlights the important role of city leaders in shaping the unique patterns of urban land development in China.