【主讲】杨荷 助教授 (厦门大学王亚南经济研究院)
【主题】Dual Landownership as Tax Shelter: How Did the Chinese Solve Ricardo's Problem?
【时间】2013年9月12日 (周四) 15：30-17：00
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼710室
【语言】中文
【摘要】The dual owner system in preindustrial China divided property rights to land into topsoil rights and subsoil rights. 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.
