Funded by Northeast Forestry University · £44,000 · 1 August 2025 – 31 December 2026 · Principal Investigator: Helen X. H. Bao
About the project
Rural land institutional change is a core issue in China’s urban–rural transformation and regional coordinated development. While existing studies have examined institutional evolution from either an institutional-economics or a behavioural perspective, few have integrated individual cognitive biases with institutional-environment interactions in a unified framework, or dynamically modelled the tripartite game among central government, local governments, and rural households.
This project combines prospect theory from behavioural economics with institutional-change theory from new institutional economics, incorporating both imposed and induced change into a single analytical model to trace the historical evolution of China’s rural land system. Using large-scale land-survey data and big-data analytics, it builds a dynamic evolution model to examine path dependence, key driving forces, and policy-transmission mechanisms. Drawing on continuous national surveys and a rich set of land-reform case studies, it applies multi-level modelling to reveal the interactive strategies of the three stakeholders — central strategic decision-making, local implementation patterns, and household behavioural responses — while clarifying the coupling between formal rules, informal constraints, and their enforcement. Given the strategic importance of Northeast China, the project focuses on Heilongjiang Province as a representative case, combining dynamic institutional-evolution analysis, text mining and spatial-econometric methods to identify the stage-specific characteristics and core determinants of rural land institutional change, and to propose targeted pathways for institutional innovation. Ultimately it aims to develop a transferable framework for diagnosing reform paths, providing a scientific basis for governance models adaptable to regional socio-economic diversity.
Team Members
- Helen X. H. Bao — Principal Investigator, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge
- Jie Liu — Co-Investigator (China), Northeast Forestry University
- Natalie Xiaoqi Liu — PhD student, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge
Publications
This project has produced the following publications:
- Behavioural Economic Analysis of Institutional Changes: Lessons Learned from China’s Land System Reforms — Helen X. H. Bao and Lei Feng (Routledge / Taylor & Francis); the book-length statement of the framework behind this project.
- Network analysis of aviation carbon emissions: spatiotemporal patterns and policy implications in the Yangtze River Delta — with Jie Liu.
Working papers
The team has been working on the following papers: