Research

Presentations: Asian and Australasian Society of Labour Economics 2026 Conference, PKU; 4th Annual Conference on China and the Global Economy, HKU; 26th China Economics Annual Conference, BNU; 19th China Economics Summer Institute, CUHK; 4th Summer Meeting in Urban Economics China, Wuhan University; 2026 CES China Annual Conference, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics; HKUST-UW Workshop on Climate Risk, Sustainability and Real Estate; HKU PhD Brownbag; World Bank Land Conference 2024, Washington, DC.

Abstract: Food-security concerns often motivate land-use regulations that preserve farmland but restrict urban expansion and labor reallocation. This paper studies the Chongqing Land Coupon Reform, which allows reclaimed rural construction land to generate tradable development rights for urban land conversion while preserving aggregate farmland. Using comprehensive transaction records, I document that coupons flow primarily from remote rural counties to urban-fringe areas. Descriptively, counties with lower initial agricultural value added per worker subsequently supply more coupons and exhibit greater rural-to-urban migration, while greater coupon supply is associated with faster grain-yield growth. I develop a quantitative spatial model with heterogeneous farming ability, endogenous migration, regulated urban land conversion, and a land coupon market. Eliminating the market reduces urban residential land by 14.0 percent and raises housing rents by 15.1 percent. It reduces aggregate rural-to-urban migration and agricultural labor productivity by 0.58 and 0.59 percent, respectively, and raises the shadow value of the urban land quota from 300 to 2,336 yuan per square meter. The results show that tradable development rights operate primarily by relaxing urban land constraints, with additional gains through migration and agricultural labor reallocation.

Presentations: 2026 CES Presidential Forum.

Abstract: Using a simple two-sector model, we show that when there are frictions to labor mobility between agricultural and non-agricultural sectors, productivity growth in agriculture may actually reduce the real income of farmers and increase the urban-rural income gap due to a negative terms-of-trade effect. When frictions are severe, the negative terms-of-trade effect may even lead to a decline in the welfare of farmers, i.e., immiserizing growth. We calibrate our model to the Chinese economy to see how much of China's rising or a lack of declining urban-rural income gap is due to productivity growth in agriculture.