题目：Rob Peter to Pay Paul – Environmental Policy and Government Debt (with Haoyang Li and Yuqin Wang)

演讲人：张同斌 (上海财经大学 助理教授)

时间：2021年12月28日（周二）12:00-13:00

地点：同济大厦A楼306室

Abstract:

In this paper, we study the responses of Chinese local governments to the environmental policy shocks. By employing the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan in China as a natural experiment, we find that a strict environmental protection policy decreases the revenue and value-added tax of industrial firms, which, consequently, leads to the reduction of GDP across treated area. Because of the restrictions imposed by the Budget Law, we find that local governments finance for the debt by utilizing local government financial vehicles (LGFVs) other than by selling land to maintain their expenditure and to offset the decline of GDP. Moreover, heterogeneity analyses suggest that the incentive of issuing off-balance sheet debt via LGFVs to stabilize local economy increases in the term of local party secretary, and the dependence of off-balance sheet debt in LGFVs is positively associated with the LGFVs’ debt burden in 2012. These results suggest long-term local government debt risk.

个人简介：

张同斌博士于2017年获得西班牙巴塞罗那自治大学经济学博士学位，研究领域为宏观经济学，金融经济学，中国经济；论文曾发表于Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control等期刊；曾多次参加国际国内学术会议如：Shanghai Macroeconomics Workshop, China Finance Associate Meeting，CCER Summer Institute，CES North American Meeting。