《学术午餐会》2019年第6期，总第155期
【时间】 6月27日12:30-14:00
【地点】 8797威尼斯老品牌305会议室
【主讲人】 Wei You (尤炜)
【主持人】 高明 助理教授
【报告题目】 The Aggregate and Distributional Welfare Effects of Controlling Internal Migration: Evidence from China
【报告摘要】 There exist large productivity gaps between the agricultural and non-agriculture sector across countries, which imply large productivity gains from encouraging rural-to-urban migration or removing internal migration restrictions. On the other hand, in making decisions about internal migration, individuals typically ignore the externalities that their decisions impose on others. For a fast-urbanizing country, the inflow of massive migrants could impose large unintended consequences on the locals (e.g. changing the wage rates and housing prices faced by the locals, and causing congestion in public goods). Desirable spatial policies, therefore, need to trade off between the aggregate efficiency gains against the distributional implications for locals and migrants. In this paper, we evaluate the aggregate and distributional welfare effects of presumably the largest intervention on internal migration in human history – the Hukou system in China, for the period 2000-2010. Using a dynamic spatial equilibrium framework, we model the Hukou system as an internal passport system which discriminates against migrants in the access to local public goods. The degree of discrimination is estimated using a revealed preference approach. Counterfactual simulations suggest that complete elimination of Hukou restrictions between 2000 and 2010 would have resulted in a 60% increase in national GDP and a 20% increase in national welfare. The increases in GDP and welfare would have mostly come from the movement of population from less productive cities to more productive/larger cities. However, the increases in overall welfare would come at the cost of the welfare of the local residents in the more productive/larger cities. The main channel through which they suffer losses is congestion in local public goods. These results suggest that more desirable urban policies in China could push large cities to accommodate an even larger population while compensating the local residents sufficiently.
【主讲人介绍】 Wei You is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at New York University. His research interests focus on migration, transportation, and other topics in urban economics. His work includes using archival data to quantitatively analyze historical cities and using spatial equilibrium models to evaluate contemporary migration policies. He completed his B.A. in Economics and Mathematics at Renmin University of China in 2009, M.A. in Economics at Peking University in 2011, and his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California, San Diego in 2017.
