【题 目】Green Gains from Connectivity: Highway Expansion and Forest Quality
【时 间】2026年10月28日（星期三），14:00-15:30
【地 点】后主楼1710会议室
【主讲人】彭 聪 讲 师（北京大学国家发展研究院）
【主持人】曹思未 副教授（北京师范大学经济与工商管理学院）
摘要：During China's expressway expansion of 2000 to 2010, land-use regulation sharply restricted the conversion of forest land and a tenure reform gave households secure claims on the timber they grew. We build a panel of 16,964 National Forest Inventory plots with timber volume measured on the ground, an intensive margin that satellite imagery does not record, and instrument distance to a new expressway with the planned expressway network and the 1962 road network. A plot 10 km closer to a new expressway gains about 0.9 percent in standing timber volume over the decade. The gains are concentrated within 20 km of the road and in the collective forests that the reform devolved to households. Reachable downstream demand, the entry of specialized forestry firms and their input suppliers, and forestry revenue among experienced households all rise with connection, while forest area does not fall. A model of market access and tenure security accounts for both outcomes, deforestation where forest land can be converted and denser standing forest where it cannot, and identifies tenure security as the margin that decides how much of the higher return households capture.
报告人简介：Cong Peng is an assistant professor at the National School of Development and the Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development, Peking University. His research is in urban, trade, and environmental economics and in AI for Social Science, with a focus on developing countries. His recent work asks whether public investment delivers what it is meant to, covering national road programs, informal settlement upgrading, and export credit insurance, among others. He works closely with policy institutions, on projects funded by the International Growth Centre and the Swiss National Science Foundation, and in ongoing collaborations with the research departments of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the World Bank. He received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of California San Diego.
