财政压力与地方政府融资平台的兴起  

Fiscal Stress and the Rise of China's Local Government Financing Platforms

作　　者：曹光宇 刘晨冉 周黎安[1] 刘畅 CAO Guangyu;LIU Chenran;ZHOU Li-An;LIU Chang(Guanghua School of Management,Peking University;The Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China,Princeton University;School of Economics and Management,The Chinese University of Hong Kong,Shenzhen)

机构地区：[1]北京大学光华管理学院,北京100871 [2]普林斯顿大学当代中国研究中心,美国新泽西州 [3]香港中文大学(深圳)经管学院,广东深圳518172

出　　处：《金融研究》2020年第5期59-76,共18页Journal of Financial Research

基　　金：北京大学数量经济与数理金融教育部重点实验室的支持;唯猎资本(Will Hunting Capital)对其博士阶段科研的资助与支持

摘　　要：本文利用2004-2006年取消农业税的自然实验,使用1994-2009年的县级面板数据首次从实证上检验了财政压力导致地方政府融资平台成立这一假说.利用双重差分模型研究发现,取消农业税改革导致的财政冲击越大,县级地方政府在改革后设立融资平台的概率越高.这一发现在不同模型设定下保持稳健,并通过了基于改革前样本和利用其他税种收入变动构造的安慰剂检验.我们还排除了上述发现由扩权强县和财政省直管县等其他财政制度改革驱动的可能性.进一步的分析表明,面临更激烈的区域间竞争、初始财政禀赋较低的县更倾向于设立融资平台.本文丰富了关于财政压力对中国地方政府行为影响的研究,有助于更好地理解中国财政体制与金融制度之间复杂的关联性.China's local governments play a key role in the formation of local infrastructure(Zhang and Xiong,2019).It is not feasible for local governments to fund massive infrastructure projects through regular tax revenue or land sales.However,China's Budget Law,enacted in 1994,strictly prohibited local governments from raising debt.Local Government Financing Platforms(LGFPs)were created by China's local governments to circumvent this legal restriction(Liu and Xiong,2018;Cong et al.,2019).A local government will inject land reserves or future land sale revenues into the LGFP as collateral to raise money.In a typical arrangement,an LGFP carries either explicit or implicit guarantees from its affiliated local government.It has long been hypothesized that local governments'fiscal stress is the root cause of the rise of China's LGFPs.However,causal evidence supporting this hypothesis remains scarce.This paper exploits the quasi-experiment of 2004-2006 China's Agricultural Taxes Abolition Reform to identify the causal effect of local government's fiscal stress on the establishment of LGFPs.Chinese counties encountered heterogeneous shocks in this reform because they had different initial levels of reliance on agricultural taxes.We therefore apply a differences-in-differences(DID)strategy to compare the outcomes before and after the reform across counties with different levels of fiscal stress.We do not have access to the financial statements of county-level LGFPs,so as a feasible method of identifying their establishment,we collect the data on the foundation of each LGFP as disclosed by the China Banking Regulatory Commission(CBRC).Our main outcome variable of interest is a time-variant dummy indicating the existence of an LGFP in a given county.We derive cross-sectional fiscal stress intensity from changes in agricultural tax income and related special subsidies before and after the reform.We also collect detailed data on county-level fiscal and economic outcomes.We find that a one-percentage-point increase in the degree of

关 键 词：地方政府融资平台 财政压力 取消农业税改革 双重差分模型 

分 类 号：F812[经济管理—财政学]