科学研究

张磊，上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院经济系教授、博士生导师。于北京大学获得经济学学士和硕士学位，美国斯坦福大学（Stanford University）获得经济学博士学位。主要研究兴趣包括公共经济学、教育经济学、经济增长。张教授的学术论文发表在Economic Journal, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of Human Capital, China Economic Review, 和《经济研究》, 《经济学（季刊）》等国内外一流学术期刊上。获得教育部第8届高等学校科学研究优秀成果奖（2019）。

This paper investigates how emigration of rural laborers affects public education spending on rural schools in the sending regions in China. To organize the empirical analyses, we construct a theoretical model of local government spending decision-making. The model captures two types of externalities of local public education spending. One is the traditional externality due to the emigration of locally educated laborers; the other is the fiscal externality because emigrants leave their children behind to receive basic education in the hometown. The model predicts that with moderate restrictions on parameter values, per student spending on public schools in the sending regions decreases with emigration rate, and the negative relationship is stronger when more children are left behind. We test these hypotheses combining data generated from the Population Censuses and City Statistics Yearbooks. We confirm these hypotheses using both an OLS estimator and an IV estimator with a Bartik-style instrumental variable. The estimation results are robust to various measures of emigration rate and education spending and to controlling for contemporaneous policy changes.