学术讲座 | 金融学系讲座（2024-06-19）

Finance Seminar

（2024-21）

Topic: Housing Privatization as Intergenerational Redistribution

Speaker: Hanming Fang, University of Pennsylvania

Time: Wednesday, June 19, 10:00-11:30 a.m. Beijing Time

Location: Room 217, Guanghua Building 2

Abstract

This paper argues that in economies with temporary fast-growing wage incomes, housing purchase subsidy to initial cohorts serves as an effective tool redistributing from the future towards the current generations.  Using China's housing reforms in the 1990s as a policy experiment, we show quantitatively that housing purchase subsidies to cohorts entering the labor market before 1994 increased substantially their homeowner rates in the initial years, which later on allowed them to enjoy the capital gain from selling their houses to future generations.  Our welfare analysis suggests that, despite welfare loss for cohorts born in the 1980s, housing purchase subsidy is more desirable for future generations than alternative social security reforms as an intergenerational transfer scheme, as the latter involves high social security tax burdens for those generations experiencing a slowdown in wage growth.

Introduction

Hanming Fang is Joseph M. Cohen Term Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds a secondary appointment at the Department of Health Care Management and the Department of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton School. He is an applied microeconomist with broad theoretical and empirical interests focusing on public economics, including topics such as discrimination, social insurance, and welfare reform, health insurance markets, and population aging. In 2008, Professor Fang was awarded the 17th Kenneth Arrow Prize by the International Health Economics Association (iHEA) for his research on the sources of advantageous selection in the Medigap insurance market. He was elected as a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2018.

Professor Fang is currently working on issues related to insurance markets, particularly the interaction between the health insurance reform and the labor market, and the alternative health insurance reform proposals. He also studies the Chinese economy, particularly on issues related to political economy, population aging and social security.

He has served as a co-editor for leading economics journals, including the Journal of Public Economics and the International Economic Review, and has served on the editorial board for numerous journals. He currently serves as a senior editor for the Journal of Risk and Insurance, and is on the editorial committee of Annual Review of Economics (2020-2024). He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), where he served as the acting director of the Chinese economy working group from 2014 to 2016. He is also a research associate of the Population Studies Center and Population Aging Research Center, and a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, an Executive Committee Member of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China, all at the University of Pennsylvania. He also served as the Scientific Director of Australia-China Population Aging Research Hub at the University of New South Wales in Australia, and is a Senior Fellow of the Asian Bureau of Economic and Finance Research (ABFER) in Singapore and a Research Fellow of the IZA in Germany.

Professor Fang received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Before joining the Penn faculty, he held positions at Yale University and Duke University.

Your participation is warmly welcomed !