题  目：Dual Landownership as Tax Shelter:An Economic Analysis of Perpetual Lease

报告人：杨  荷       助理教授     

        厦门大学王亚南经济研究院

主持人：夏�君   浙江大学经济学院

时  间：2014年4月4日   星期五   15:00-17:00

地  点：浙大玉泉校区外经贸大楼418室

                        欢迎广大师生参加！

Abstract: The dual owner system in preindustrial China divided property rights to land into topsoil right and subsoil right. The divided ownership was essentially a secure, hereditary and perpetual lease that amounts to partial ownership to both the landlord and the tenant. This paper hypothesizes that dual ownership persisted as a tax shelter for heavily taxed peasants who contracted with lightly taxed gentry to maximize the value of land. To test the tax shelter hypothesis, I exploit a dataset constructed from the land transaction records and rent collection archives of Confucius's Lineage in the Qing Dynasty. I find that as the gentry's tax benefits declined after the tax reform in mid Qing period, peasants tended to consolidate landownership and become sole owners. A conventional theme of the literature on land tenancy is that economic factors such as agency costs and risk factors can determine the choice of tenancy contracts. The Chinese dual owner system suggests that besides the above-mentioned factors, taxation can also play an important role in determining land tenure systems.

                                                    CRPE秘书处
                                                    2014-3-31