Professor Dongmin Kong, Associate Professor Yanan Wang, has published a collaborative paper titled Deregulating the Input Market by Central Inspection: Lessons from China's Primary Land Market"  in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization is a top-tier journal in the field of organizational and behavioral economics, primarily publishing research on economic decision-making, organizations and behavior, and economic changes. It is recognized as an A-class journal by academic journals at the university level.

Abstract: Leveraging a reform that assigns central inspectorates to local units in China to oversee industrial land transactions, this study examines the effects of unleashing the local government's influence on land prices using a difference-in-differences design. Our research provides compelling evidence that the reform leads to an additional 50% increase in industrial land prices and significantly enhances the productivity of local industrial firms. The rise in land prices can be attributed to an increase in market-oriented transactions. Additionally, we discover an improvement in the quality of new entrants and a reduction in resource misallocation following the reform. By demonstrating the positive externalities of central supervision on local government intervention in the industrial land market, our findings suggest that, in certain cases, central inspection can mitigate distorting behaviors of the local government in input markets. This, in turn, facilitates the screening of productive entrants and hinders investments by unproductive incumbents, thereby improving the overall productivity of economic entities.

Keywords: The helping hand; Local government; Land prices; Misallocation; Firm productivity

Link：孔东民 王亚男-Deregulating the input market by central inspection Lessons from China's primary land market.pdf

Author profile

Dongmin Kong is a specially appointed Wenlan Scholar Professor at the School of Finance, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, and a doctoral supervisor. He is also a member of the Financial Management Professional Committee of the China Association for Modernizing Management Science. His main research directions include financial economics, behavioral finance, and China's capital market. He has published numerous papers in domestic and international journals such as Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Management Science, Economic Research, Journal of Financial Research, and China Economic Quarterly. Professor Kong has presided over major projects funded by the National Social Science Fund as well as multiple projects funded by the National Natural Science Fund and the National Social Science Fund. Currently, he serves as the editor-in-chief of Economic Analysis and Policy and the deputy editor of journals such as the Chinese Journal of Finance.

Yanan Wang is an associate professor at the School of Finance, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law. She holds a Ph.D. in Finance from the School of Economics, Fudan University, and completed her doctoral program jointly with WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management in Germany. Her main research areas include corporate finance, contract theory, and behavioral finance. Currently, she is the principal investigator of a youth project funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and has participated in multiple projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation and the National Social Science Fund. Her research has been published in leading domestic journals such as Economic Research and Journal of Financial Research, as well as in SSCI journals including Journal of Corporate Finance, China Economic Review, Energy Economics, Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, Economic Modelling, Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, and Finance Research Letters.