讲座主题：Not in the Spread: Developer Defaults, Municipal Borrowing, and Bank Absorption in China

主讲嘉宾：李科杨 对外经济贸易大学国际经济贸易学院副教授

讲座时间：2026年5月22日周五14:00-16:00

讲座地点：中央财经大学沙河校区学院楼11号楼308会议室

嘉宾简介：李科杨，对外经济贸易大学国际经济贸易学院副教授，SSCI期刊China Economic Review副主编。主要研究领域为公共经济学、金融学、城市与房地产经济学。在Journal of Public Economics、Journal of Development Economics、Journal of Urban Economics、Journal of Human Resources、经济学（季刊）等国内外一流经济学期刊发表论文十余篇。主持国家自然科学基金青年项目，获得亚洲房地产学会年会最佳论文奖、世界华人不动产学会年会最佳论文奖（特等奖）等学术荣誉和奖励。

内容摘要：How do subnational governments sustain debt expansions when their primary revenue base collapses and market discipline fails to bite? We answer this question by exploiting Chinese real estate developer bond defaults as plausibly exogenous shocks to local fiscal capacity. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design on a city–quarter panel of 263 cities from 2016 to 2022, we document a powerful fiscal substitution effect: cities exposed to a developer default replace lost land revenues by expanding off-budget local government financing vehicle (LGFV) bond issuance by 67.5%, or approximately CNY 170 billion annually. However, this borrowing expansion occurs without any widening of yield spreads, pointing to non-market debt absorption. We trace this pricing anomaly to locally affiliated city commercial banks (CCBs), which absorb these LGFV bonds under government influence and subsequently issue subordinated debt to relieve the resulting capital pressure. Our findings offer novel evidence on how the sovereign-bank nexus operates at the subnational level, demonstrating how non-market debt absorption suppresses price discovery, transfers fiscal risk into the banking system, and masks the buildup of systemic fragility.