This paper studies whether research universities can boost regional economic development through an exogenous shock of a forced relocation of a research university in China. We analyze the development in the treated regions compared with a set of control regions that are created using the...

China's rapid economic growth in recent decades has not led to balanced income distribution: inter- and intra-provincial income inequality have been increasing and their respective contribution to the total income inequality remains relatively stable. Based on a new set of prefectural database...

China's Hukou system poses severe restrictions on labor mobility. This paper assesses the consequences of relaxing these restrictions for China's internal economic geography. We base our analysis on a new economic geography model. First, we obtain estimates of the important model parameters on...

This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial concentration of economic activity. Leveraging a new global dataset of geo-located Chinese government-financed projects over the period from 2000 to 2014 together with measures of spatial inequality based on...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the convergence process in China by taking into account the spatial interaction between factors. The paper shows that there has been a dramatic increase in the spatial dependence of China’s per capita GDP in the last 20 years. The consequence of space...

In the past two decades, controversial evidence has been produced supporting the case for local protectionism in China. This paper overviews the most important contributions and presents a new approach which applies spatial econometrics on prefectural-level data. The main advantage of this...

China's Hukou system poses severe restrictions on labor mobility. This paper assesses the consequences of relaxing these restrictions for China's internal economic geography. We base our analysis on a new economic geography model. First, we obtain estimates of the important model parameters on...

This working paper assesses national policy and governance mechanisms that can influence green growth in Chinese cities. It applies the OECD conceptual framework for urban green growth to examine the potential challenges and opportunities for increasing economic growth through reducing the...

Urbanisation in China has long been held back by various restrictions on land and internal migration but has taken off since the 1990s, as these impediments started to be gradually relaxed. People have moved in large numbers to richer cities, where productivity is higher and has increased...

China's rapid economic growth in recent decades has not led to balanced income distribution: inter- and intra-provincial income inequality have been increasing and their respective contribution to the total income inequality remains relatively stable. Based on a new set of prefectural database...