Professor Zhang Jipeng’s Team Publishes Research in Top Development Economics Journal Journal of Development Economics

Recently, the research paper Endogenous Migration Restrictions and Population Aging in China by Professor Zhang Jipeng (corresponding author) from the School of Economics at Shandong University, Dr. Chen Zhu from the School of Economics at Southwest University of Political Science and Law, and Researcher Zhou Kang from the School of Economics at Zhejiang University (co-corresponding author) was published in Journal of Development Economics, a top development economics journal.

An important feature of China's household registration system reform is that local governments promote it step by step and implement classified policies according to local actual conditions. To measure the intensity of household registration reform in various cities, this study combines data-driven methods and text analysis to construct a new set of quantitative indicators of urban household registration thresholds, and on this basis, studies the impact of local population aging on household registration reform. The study finds that population aging significantly promotes local governments to lower urban household registration thresholds, and this effect is particularly obvious in areas with low fertility rates. Population aging brings significant challenges to the local labor market, housing market, pension system and urban economic growth, so local governments respond to population aging by lowering urban household registration thresholds. This study provides a new perspective for understanding the internal motivation for promoting household registration reform at the local level. This paper is one of the phased achievements of the General Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China Poverty Alleviation by Relocation, Population Migration and Intergenerational Mobility under the Constraint of Household Registration System (72173098) and the Major Special Program of the National Social Science Fund of China Research on the Main Dilemmas and Solutions to Accelerating the Citizenization of Agricultural Transfer Population (24ZDA047) interpreting the spirit of the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

Zhang Jipeng is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Economics at Shandong University, an Outstanding Young and Middle-aged Scholar of Shandong University, and Chief Expert of Major Programs of the National Social Science Fund of China. He obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pittsburgh and his B.A. and M.A. in Economics from Fudan University. He has worked at Nanyang Technological University and Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. His main research directions are public economics and public finance, immigration, regional and urban development. He has published dozens of papers in top domestic and foreign journals such as Social Sciences in China, Economic Research Journal, Economic Research Journal (Quarterly), International Economic Review, and Journal of Development Economics, and won the Excellent Achievement Award in Humanities and Social Sciences of Universities of the Ministry of Education.