We quantify the macroeconomic and welfare effects of a social health insurance reform that occurred in China in 2016 using a two-sector model with endogenous rural-to-urban migrant workers. The calibrated model mimics the rural-to-urban migration and rural-urban wage gap from 2007 through 2016. We find that the health insurance reform depresses rural-to-urban migration and leads to reallocation of labor and capital in both the rural and urban sectors. As the result, we find that the consolidation of premium and reimbursement expands the rural-urban wage gap by approximately 6.8% but universal health insurance coveragenarrows the rural-urban wage gap by approximately 0.9%. Keeping the government deficit unchanged, the welfare results favor universal health insurance relative to pure consolidation.

How does the capacity removal policy affect China’s economy? To quantify the policy outcomes and costs, a four-sector model with vertical market structures is built. The calibrated model shows that, to achieve the policy goal, 10% of equipment operation in the high energy-consuming sectors must be shut down. This policy leads to an improved energy structure in which total energy consumption drops by 4.75% at the cost of a contraction in economic growth, where the total output declines by 12.31%. The numerical experiments find that the optimal policy is to limit the production scale in both the iron/steel industry and the fossil energy industry, closing 9% and 7% of the production, respectively, since doing so minimizes output loss and improves the energy structure. This paper quantifies the impact of the current capacity removal policy and provides policy alternatives to reach the same policy target with a lower output loss.

We evaluate a reform of the US tax system switching to consumption taxation instead of income taxation. We do so in an environment that allows for progressivity of consumption taxes through differential tax rates between basic and non-basic consumption goods. The consumption tax system that maximizes aggregate welfare involves a 4% subsidy on basic consumption goods and a 68% tax on non-basic goods. Such a tax scheme generates 10% higher output in the long run, with a small increase in inequality. Nonetheless, the bench- mark with progressive income taxes and mild consumption taxes provides higher welfare on aggregate in the steady state, and even more so if we consider the transition.

开征房地产税会对中国城市的房价产生什么影响？已有研究的结论缺少经济学理论模型对影响机制的表达。本文利用房地产税、房价和租金的折现价值理论模型，推导出房地产税对房价和租金产生影响的路径和机制，为中国开征房地产税决策提供佐证参数。本文根据文献及其使用的数据，采用已获共识的贴现率、租售比、可行税率及税收-公共服务转化率进行模拟，结果表明：若房地产税率为0.5%且税入不用于新增公共服务，房产实值可能下降8.3%~12.5%；若税入用于增加和改善基本公共服务，房产实值降幅减为1.7%~2.5%，但租金可能上涨6.7%~20%。房价可能大幅下跌的原因是房价中存在短期泡沫；租金上涨的前提是租房人可受益的公共服务价值有实质性提升。基于房地产税对房价波动的影响，本文推测：房市泡沫受挤压且房价较稳定的时段可能是开征房地产税的适选时机。