This article explores the nature of China’s land-use rights system, its evolution and impact on resource allocation and local governments’ public finances. In recent decades, the public ownership of land has not hindered the development of a thriving market economy. Since the inception of...

This paper develops a new approach for measuring the stringency of a major form of land-use regulation, building-height restrictions, and it applies the method to an extraordinary dataset of land-lease transactions from China. Our theory shows that the elasticity of land price with respect to...

The Chinese government has been using annual quotas to control the amount of farm-land that can be converted for urban uses in cities. Using a sample of more than 1.5 million land-lease transactions during 2007-2016, we document facts on land conversion for urban development in China. We present...

China’s land market features a substantial industrial discount: industrial-zoned land is an order of magnitude cheaper than residential land. In contrast to explanations centered on subsidies to industry, we find that a primary determinant of this price gap is local public finance. Under the...

China's land market features a substantial industrial discount: industrial-zoned land is an order of magnitude cheaper than residential land. In contrast to explanations centered on subsidies to industry or promoting industry growth, we emphasize the importance of future tax revenues from the...

This paper examines the causal effect of land use policy on employment growth in Chinese cities. We find that a stricter Floor Area Ratio Regulation (FARR) leads to a reduction in employment growth in Chinese cities- a one standard deviation reduction in FARR leads to a concurrent reduction of...

This paper presents a few stylized facts on the patterns of China's industrialization by computing a set of multi-dimensional measures on industrial concentration, regional specialization, and clustering based on census data at the firm level in 1995 and 2004. Our results show that China's rapid...