Professor Wenbin Wu’s Paper is Accepted and Published in International Level-A Journal, Focusing on Whether Governments Should Promote or Restrain Urbanization | Academics

Release time：2025-04-14    

FISF MARCOM  April 14^th 2025 18:28  Shanghai

The paper entitled “Should Governments Promote or Restrain Urbanization?” coauthored by Wenbin Wu, Associated Professor in Finance at FISF, and his partner Wei You was accepted and published in the international level-A journal, Journal of International Economics, and was quickly approaching print date.

教授介绍

Professor Introduction

吴文斌

Wenbin Wu

复旦大学国际金融学院金融学副教授

Associated Professor in Finance at FISF

Main contents of the paper:

In a system of cities model that incorporates urban externalities, equilibrium city sizes deviate from optimal city sizes, which suggests a role for government intervention. Using a general equilibrium framework that incorporates agglomeration benefits and costs and that is calibrated to data from China between 2000 and 2020, this work shows that it is generally welfare-reducing to control city sizes through internal migration restrictions since the frictions they introduce outweigh the benefits of correcting for city size deviations (a GDP loss of 13.6% and a welfare loss of 4.7%). However, we also find that most large Chinese cities have already surpassed the optimal sizes from local perspective, so without controlling city sizes, the average welfare of city residents would decrease. This suggests that a combination of policies is needed to both improve aggregate welfare and alleviate the distributional consequences for a rapidly urbanizing country.

FISF

Ever since establishment, FISF has witnessed 39 professors publishing a total of 172 papers on world-famous academic journals, among which 120 academic papers were published on international level-A journals (including A+, A and A-). The teaching team of the school has always upheld the school motto of “Unified FISF, Excellence, Responsibility, Innovation”, devoting themselves wholeheartedly to the academic research work. They manage to maintain a high level of academic achievements in both quantity and quality, which fully reflects the excellent strength of the teaching team of FISF in the field of academic research. In the future, FISF will keep on pursuing international cutting-edge scientific research achievements and continue to making greater contributions to the promotion of first-class financial and economic disciplines.