Tenure security is commonly recognized as an important factor in stimulating long-term investments in land. Recent studies suggest that a distinction between legal, actual and perceived tenure security needs to be made in analyzing tenure security. This study discusses the relationships between legal, actual and perceived land tenure security in rural China, and empirically examines the impact of actual on perceived land tenure security by applying Probit models to household and village survey data collected in four provinces. Using household expectations about the absence of land reallocations within the next five years as the dependent variable, we find that tenure security is positively affected by the possession of land certificates in villages that periodically reallocated land but not in villages that did not do so. The estimated impact is larger for land certificates issued in the new round of land certification than for land certificates that were issued earlier.

Developing economies face challenges in improving the overall performance of farms. An essential challenge could be a substantial shift in the agricultural labor force to off-farm sectors during the process of economic transition. This paper estimates the causal impact of migration on the economic and environmental performance of rice farms, measured using technical efficiency and fertilizer use efficiency. A stochastic frontier analysis, based on the survey data collected in four regions of China, is applied, finding an average technical efficiency of 0.92, while the average fertilizer use efficiency is only 0.22. The results of propensity score matching suggest that migration has a marginally negative impact on both technical efficiency and fertilizer use efficiency of their rice production, while the impact is amplified for farmers who participated in migration more intensively. This would imply that the government policy on the migration of rural households might also need to consider this impact.

Understanding the housing price premium of high-quality education could be important for improving our knowledge on the formation of housing prices and potential consequences of educational resources misallocation. This paper estimates the housing price premium of high-quality primary schools in Shanghai, China. Applying the hedonic price and paired difference models with a boundary fixed effect to the house resale transaction data from January to October 2019, the study found that the housing price premium of high-quality primary school was approximately 15.6%. Moreover, the price premium of small houses was larger than that of large houses. The results suggest that high-quality education has a significant capitalization effect on housing values. This implies that the policy of restricting one student to have a seat in only one particular school within the zoning area would lead to greater education inequality and future policies should consider this effect.