Wednesday, April 20, 2016 | 2:00pm-3:30pm | Room 331, HSBC Business School Building

Abstract

This paper investigates how government intervention in land market affects China's urban development, using data from prefecture-level cities between 2000 and 2010. We find that government intervention enlarges the impact of positive productivity shocks on housing price appreciation, through mainly the government control over residential land supply. However, we find no significant evidences that high government intervention constrains population growth and leads to wage increase. Such patterns of urban dynamics can be explained by the fact that migrant workers are the driving force behind China's urbanization, but they have limited housing demand and are not well compensated.