报告题目：Measuring Urban Bias in Capital Allocation: Evidence from China

报 告 人：肖伟副教授

主 持 人：何勤英教授

时    间：2019年10月23日（星期三）上午10：00

地    点：经济管理学院602室

报告摘要：Even though urban bias in resource allocations, wherein governments neglect their rural population in favor of urban residents, is often considered as an important concern in developing countries, empirical evidence on whether urban areas indeed receive an inefficiently higher level of investment remains limited. In this paper, using micro data on firms from urban and rural areas of China and taking efficiency considerations into account, we measure the extent and patterns of urban bias in capital allocation. First, we find that urban firms appear to have cheaper access to capital. Second, this urban-rural gap is primarily driven by state-owned enterprises, suggesting that investment choices by the state, as opposed to constraints faced by private enterprises, represent the more likely factor for the underinvestment of capital in rural areas. Exploiting the regional variation across Chinese prefectures, we also document how the urban-rural gap in capital allocation varies across important market and political factors, such as the level of financial development, the geographic proximity of the urban area to centers of power, and the level of state control over the local economy.

Keywords:Urban bias; Capital allocation, China.

专家简介：

肖伟，博士，西南财经大学经济与管理研究院副教授。于南开大学经济学院获得学士与硕士学位，并于2014年在斯德哥尔摩大学经济系获得经济学博士学位。主要研究领域包括城市经济学和发展经济学，致力于城乡间资源配置、房地产市场与劳动力市场的互动及中国农村政策的影响等问题的研究。有数篇论文发表于Journal of Comparative Economics、Journal of Regional Science、Regional Science and Urban Economics和Land Use Policy等期刊。现主持一项国家自然科学基金青年项目。