This paper investigates whether a location's growth benefits or suffers from proximity to a big city and explores the underlying mechanisms. Using county-level data from China for 1990–2020, we find that an area's being close to a big city (in the 150–250 km range) reduces its decadal population growth rate by 2.9–3.6 percentage points relative to areas beyond 250 km, which we call the urban growth shadow effect. Initial agricultural employment share has the strongest power to explain whether the negative effect exists. The mechanism is consistent with lower opportunity costs of migration for people employed in agriculture, yet contrasts with core–periphery models that give transport costs a central role. Notably, this effect exhibits a temporal trend. Over time, being proximate to a big city becomes increasingly beneficial.

This paper develops a unified theory integrating the three pillars of the pension system—public, occupational, and private pensions—within a heterogeneous-agent overlapping generations (OLG) model. By incorporating income heterogeneity and institutional features unique to each pillar, the model captures how individuals across the income distribution participate in the pension system and derive utility. We characterize the distinct yet interactive roles of each pillar in providing risk sharing and retirement security and identify fundamental trade-offs in pension design. Our model provides a laboratory for analyzing the coordination of the three pillars that aims at enhancing equity and fiscal sustainability.

健康是居民生活质量和社会福利的重要指标。在医保基金趋于“紧平衡”的背景下，提高居民自身的健康投资能力与意愿具有重要意义。本文使用中国家庭追踪调查数据，实证研究发现，房价变动通过改变居民对健康投资的支付能力和支付意愿，进而影响个体健康水平。基于这一发现，本文构建了一个同时包含内生住房和健康决策的生命周期模型，使用家庭数据校准参数，定量分析房价增长率和波动率对资产配置与居民健康的长期影响。模型显示。房价增长率和波动率会通过改变居民的支付能力和支付意愿，进而影响其健康投资。定量分析结果表明，该影响呈现非线性特征，具有显著的经济含义。本研究深入分析了房价变动在短期和长期的潜在健康效应，有助于理解居民资产配置与健康决策的联动机制，并对缓解医保基金支出压力提供了政策设计启示。