土地市场降温与地方政府债务风险:来自区县级数据的证据

Land Market Cooling and Local Government Debt Risk:Evidence from County-Level Data

土地市场持续降温会引发土地财政格局发生改变,进而波及地方政府债务风险,使之不同于以往。本文基于中国区县级数据,构建强度双重差分模型检验了土地市场降温对地方政府债务风险的影响。研究发现:土地市场降温导致地方政府债务风险上升,其内在逻辑在于,土地市场降温导致土地流拍增加、土地出让收入下降,进而通过财力渠道引致地方政府债务风险上升。为应对债务压力,地方政府偏好发行长期债券并增加借新还旧比重,这进一步加剧了地方政府债务风险的累积。异质性分析发现,城投债存量较高的地方政府更容易受到土地市场降温的负面冲击,而财政收入质量较高的地方政府则能够较好地抵御上述风险。本文系统分析了土地市场降温背景下的地方政府债务风险变化及机制,为缓解地方财政压力、防范化解地方政府债务风险提供了实证证据及政策参考。

As China’s economy transitions to a stage of high-quality development,preventing and resolving major risks have become an important strategic decision of the central government.In recent years,the risk of local government debt in China has experienced a continuous growth trend,so strict control is urgently needed.In the long-term process of reform and development,there is a close connection between land finance and local debt.On the one hand,land is a powerful endorsement of local government credit and an important guarantee for the smooth issuance of bonds by local governments.On the other hand,the revenue of government funds,with land transfer income as the main component,is also an important source of funding for the repayment of principal and interest of local bonds,especially special bonds.Therefore,in the long-term development process,the risk of local government debt is covered by land finance and is still within a controllable range.However,in recent years,China’s land market has been continuously sluggish,and the situation of local government land finance is also not optimistic.Moreover,although the scale of the transfer revenue of the right to use state-owned land in China has been continuously increasing,its growth rate has begun to gradually decline.The cooling of the land market not only makes it difficult for land finance to continue but also affects the local government’s tax revenue in the housing transaction process and even further leads to the lack of sufficient credit guarantee for local government debt issuance and the lack of sufficient funds to guarantee the repayment of principal and interest,exacerbating the accumulation of local government debt risk.Under the cooling of the land market,the risk of local government debt has taken on new characteristics and needs to be reexamined urgently.Therefore,based on the realistic background of the cooling of the land market,this study investigates the impact and internal mechanism of this new fiscal situation on the risk of local government debt.This study selects the real estate regulation policies of 2018 to represent the impact of land market cooling and constructs an empirical framework of the difference-in-differences method to identify the causal relationship between land market cooling and local government debt risk.The empirical analysis revealed that the cooling of the land market will lead to an increase in the risk of local government debt.This impact passed multiple robustness tests.The specific manifestation of local government debt risk caused by the cooling of the land market is the increase in financing costs of local government debt and the decrease in the efficiency of activating special debt balance limits.These risk factors of local government debt are not conducive to long-term stable and sustainable economic development.This study believes that the internal mechanism of the above-mentioned impacts lies in the fact that after the introduction of real estate regulation policies,regions that originally relied more on land finance will be more affected,and the cooling of the land market will be more obvious,leading to more severe restrictions on the land transfer behavior of local governments in these regions,manifested by an increase in the number of land auctions and a decrease in land transfer income.These situations result in a significant decrease in the available financial resources of local governments,leading to a greater increase in the debt ratio.The decomposition test also confirmed the above conclusion.After the cooling of the land market,the changes in the financial sector of local governments are significantly greater than those in the debt sector,which generally leads to an increase in the debt ratio.To cope with fiscal and debt pressures,local governments tend to issue bonds with longer maturities to postpone the time of repayment and increase the proportion of borrowing new and repaying old debts,intending to ease the current debt pressure.In the heterogeneity analysis section,the study found that local governments with a higher stock of urban investment bonds have a higher degree of debt ratio increase after the land market cools down;the increase in debt ratio in regions with higher fiscal revenue quality is significantly lower than that in other regions;and the central region is more affected by the impact of the policy.