Yutong Guo

Over 1,000 km² of rural land is acquired annually in China as part of the rapid industrialization and urbanization process, with varying amounts of compensation provided to millions of affected rural individuals. How does the generosity of land acquisition compensation shape migration patterns and outcomes of displaced rural individuals? This paper constructs a novel dataset of village-level land acquisition events in three central provinces of China between 2011 and 2015, together with population micro-census data to track migrants and observe outcomes at their destination. To identify causal effects, I exploit exogenous variations in compensation levels driven by agricultural income shocks at the time local governments set compensation bases. The findings suggest that, as per-capita compensations increase, migrants become more likely to move for resettlement rather than employment, for example by reuniting with relatives instead of relocating alone. This pattern is more pronounced among older and less-educated individuals. In contrast, compensation levels do not appear to affect their housing and working conditions at their destination in the short run.

Presentations: ES European Winter Meeting, EEA, ERSA, ES Asian Summer School, AYEW, Southern PhD Economics Conference, Welsh Post-Graduate Research Conference, Bristol School Research Day

This paper empirically explores whether political connections influence urban expansion in China. Leaders at the city level might have incentives to acquire rural land and sell it to developers for urban development, a process partly monitored by province-level officials. I measure political connections between city and province leaders through a detailed analysis of their work histories and identify the effect of connections on urban expansion from exogenous variation generated by the turnover of province leaders. The result may suggest that, rather than connection itself, the difference in urban expansion between cities with connected leaders and those without is mostly explained by the unobserved characteristics of connected leaders and the development potential of their cities. This overall result could hide markedly different treatment effects across different environments. For instance, communication via connections might help highly-productive cities get more land approval; collective corruption would be more prevalent before the 2012 anti-corruption campaign; promotion incentives could have more bite with younger leaders. I conduct additional tests and find very little evidence in favor of these mechanisms. Overall, political connections themselves do not seem to affect urban expansion.

This study provides descriptive evidence on rural-urban land price gaps at Chinese city fringes and examines the adjustment frictions that sustain them. In the classic monocentric city model, urban expansion proceeds outward until the value of land for urban use reaches that for agricultural use. In practice, however, this process can be distorted by various frictions, such as regulatory constraints, geographic barriers, and transaction delays. To quantify these price wedges, I delineate urban boundaries by applying a density-based clustering algorithm to high-resolution land cover data and combine urban land transaction prices with estimated rural agricultural land values. The resulting measure shows that urban land prices at the fringe are, on average, 7.24 times rural land values at adjacent locations in Chinese cities. Geographic constraints and transaction delays are strongly associated with larger price gaps, while measures of land regulation have limited explanatory power once city characteristics are taken into account.