Seminars / HenU School of Economics

Date and Time: November 8th, 2019, 3:00 - 5:00 pm

Room: A 101 in the Economics Building (Museum)

Abstract

This paper focuses on the role of local politicians’ early-life experiences in their policy decisions while in office. We take China’s Great Famine (1959–61) as a natural experiment and examine its impact on the fiscal decisions of County Party Secretaries (CPS) who experienced this famine in their early childhood. We construct a data set that matches the biographical information of 2,831 CPS with fiscal data of 1,715 counties during 1993–2007.

Date and Time: September 18th, 2019, 3:00 - 5:00 pm

Room: A 101 in the Economics Building (Museum)

Abstract

We examine the general equilibrium and welfare effects of various public policies that either restrict or facilitate migration on migrant workers and local residents. We do so by building a carefully estimated and calibrated computable general equilibrium model and then carrying out policy simulations using Shanghai as an example. Specifically, we use our model to answer whether restricting low-skilled worker in-flow would benefit or hurt local residents of different skill types.