Return to Value Rationality, Focusing on The Reform of the Household Registration System under the Regulation of Local Government: Based on Chengdu’s “Dual-Track and Parallel” Settlement Policy

This study believes that effective local government regulation is the key to achieving successful household registration governance, that is, in the system creation and policy formulation, tool rationality returns to value rationality. The characteristics of “political people” and “economic people” in local governments encourage them to make rational decisions in the reform of the household registration system, resulting in household registration policies that are often highly directional and purposeful, making it difficult to consider development efficiency and social fairness. Chengdu’s “dual-track parallel” settlement strategy is a behavior choice for local governments to return to value rationality, reflecting Chengdu municipal government’s “social people” feature. It achieves a balance between meeting the needs of talents and building a healthy household registration proportion by correlating “conditional entry” and “integral entry.” This not only realizes the absorption of high-quality talents, but also provides settlement channels for outsiders with limited conditions.

Introduction: Urban Inequality and Segregation in Europe and China

In this chapter, we set out the rationale and key themes for the book. We briefly summarise the broad historical and institutional context, particularly the period of reformin China since 1978, and the background to the hukouhousehold registration system, which has become a key source of segregation and inequality in modern China. We then provide an overview of the book including a synopsis of each chapter and the various links between them. We conclude with a call for further research and evidence-based policy innovation.

Is household registration system responsible for the limited participation of stock market in China?

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the effect of China’s unique household registration system (hukou) on stock market participation.Design/methodology/approachIn an effort to estimate the effect of hukou on households' financial behavior, we draw on data from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and use probit model and tobit model to test the effect of hukou on households stock market participation.FindingsThe results are with strong interpretative power over the limited participation of stock market in China-investors living in urban areas with urban hukou are more likely to participate in stock markets and allocate a larger fraction of financial assets to stocks and remarkably robust to a battery of robustness checks. The dual structure of social security caused by the household registration system could explain this result. Furthermore, marriage plays such a role of integrating social resources attached to hukou that only the marriage of individuals with urban hukou could significantly promote households' participation in the stock market. For married families, a household in which both husband and wife have urban hukou has a greater possibility to invest in stocks relative to those with rural hukou.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the literature in two ways. First, much literature focuses on the stock market limited participation puzzle and gives explanations from the perspectives of individual heterogeneity and financial markets. This paper examines the effect of hukou. Such an idea is instructive to some developing countries where residents are treated differently because of the institutional reason. Second, the effects we find are economically meaningful. Our estimates indicate that medical insurance attached to hukou can explain almost 58% of the impact of hukou, which suggests that the key to reforming China's current household registration system is to make welfare separate from hukou. Moreover, homogamy based on hukou widens the gap of households' risky assets, which provides a new view to understand the income gap in the cities of China and the heterogeneous effect of marriage on stock market participation.

Erratum: Yuan, B., et al. Household Registration System, Migration, and Inequity in Healthcare Access. Healthcare 2019, 7, 61

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