题目：Land Development and Local Political Cycles

时间：4月10日  10：00-11：30

地点：中欧平台武东路校区114

演讲者：张晓昱博士，香港中文大学经济系

摘要： This paper investigate how the prefecture leader’s political cycles affect land supply using a set of unique database, combining land transaction data with city officials’ resume data. Our empirical results show that annual revenues from land sales increase as the leader stays longer in his position. However, annual amount of land supply keep decreasing along the leader’s political cycle. We provide explanations on the sharp contrast between land sales revenue and land supply using two promotion incentives of provincial leaders. First, the growth competition incentive encourages the leader to sell industrial and public land to increase GDP. Second, the fiscal revenue incentive stimulates the leader to sell residential and commercial land to generate more revenue from land sales. It takes two or more years to build factories to get output on industrial land, while revenue can be got immediately from commercial land sales. To maximize his/her promotion possibility, the prefecture leader tends to supply more industrial land at the start of his/her term, and sell more commercial land at the end of his/her term. We also conduct a DDD analysis by employing the restrict-development zone policy as an exogenous shock, which clearly shows the incentive to allocate industrial land vanishes when GDP target is no longer counted for promotion.