Title: From Differentiation to Equilibrium: How Local Independent Bond Issuance Affects the Urban-Rural Income Gap

Speaker: Li Weiping, Associate Professor and Doctoral Supervisor of the School of Finance, City University of Macau; Distinguished Professor of the School of Business, Taishan University. His main research interests are corporate finance, green finance, digital finance and cultural finance. He has currently published more than 30 papers in international SSCI/SCI journals such as Journal of Financial Stability, Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Business Strategy and the Environment, Energy Economics, Journal of Accounting Literature, European Journal of Finance, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (a journal under Nature), Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, International Review of Economics and Finance and Accounting & Finance, as well as domestic authoritative journals such as Accounting Research. He presides over one general project of the Guangdong Provincial Natural Science Foundation, and also serves as a Young Editor of China Journal of Accounting Research, a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Government and Audit Research Center of Southwest University of Finance and Economics, and a Member of the Young Scholars Committee of the Accounting Academic Alliance.

Abstract: Taking the implementation of the new Budget Law as an opportunity to construct a quasi-natural experiment, this paper uses city panel data from 2012 to 2019 to explore the impact of local governments' independent bond issuance on the urban-rural income gap. The research finds that local governments' independent bond issuance can effectively narrow the urban-rural income gap, and its main path is to increase the income level of rural residents. Mechanism analysis reveals that local governments' independent bond issuance can narrow the urban-rural income gap by accelerating the urbanization process, increasing people's livelihood financial expenditure and reducing dependence on land finance. Further research shows that in cities with a higher level of financial development and fiscal transparency, the effect of local governments' independent bond issuance on narrowing the urban-rural income gap is more significant. This paper enriches the research on the economic consequences of local governments' independent bond issuance, provides a new perspective for understanding the influencing factors of the urban-rural income gap, and at the same time provides useful policy references for optimizing the urban-rural income distribution pattern and improving the local government debt governance system.

Date & time: 09 June 2025, 10:00 - 11:30

Venue: B321, Zhixin Building, Central Campus, Shandong University