【时间】4月27日（星期三）11:00-12:30
【地点】zoom线上
【题目】Urban Growth Shadows Revisited: County-Level Evidence from China and the U.S.
【主讲人】尤炜（北京大学新结构经济学研究院助理教授）
Wei You is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of New Structural Economics, Peking University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego in 2017 and was a Research Fellow at Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University in 2017 – 2020. His research interests include urban economics, development economics, international trade and economic history. His research has been published in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of Housing Economics, and Remote Sensing
【摘要】Does a location’s growth benefit or suffer from geographical proximity to big cities? Using 1990-2020 county-level data from China, we find that being close to big cities had a negative effect on population growth during the period of 2000-2020 at a distance of 100-200km to the big cities. There is also substantial heterogeneity in the growth shadow effect: while the Beijing-Tianjin agglomeration had a negative effect on population growth of surrounding cities and counties, Shanghai and Guangzhou-Shenzhen agglomerations had a positive effect. Using 1840-2000 county-level data from the U.S., we confirm the finding of Cuberes, Desmet, and Rappaport (2021 JUE) that proximity to large urban centers was negatively associated with growth between 1840 and 1920, and positively associated with growth after 1920. Different from Cuberes, Desmet, and Rappaport (2021), who interpret the results as being driven by the secular decline in inter-city and intra-city commuting costs, we interpret the results in both China and the U.S. as being driven by structural transformation out of agriculture.
