Zetian Xin

Zetian Xin is a postgraduate researcher working on fiscal and taxation issues, examining how institutional reforms shape innovation and development.

His work explores local fiscal systems and their effects on real-economy innovation.

Fiscal shocks and municipal non-tax revenue

A study of how the Business Tax-to-VAT reform affected the expansion of non-tax revenue in Chinese cities, and the role sub-provincial fiscal self-sufficiency plays in buffering that effect.

• Data. 270 prefecture-level cities, 2011–2020; balanced panel with sample screening and preprocessing.
• Identification. Intensity difference-in-differences on the fiscal shock from the Business Tax-to-VAT reform, with city and province-year interactive fixed effects, isolating confounding from the VAT 50/50 split.
• Dynamic effects. Parallel-trends and event-study analysis to verify the precondition of the DID identification, followed by placebo permutation tests to rule out spurious effects from random assignment.
• Benchmark regression. Main effect of the reform on non-tax revenue expansion, and the buffering moderation of sub-provincial fiscal self-sufficiency.
• Heterogeneity. Cities grouped by sub-provincial fiscal self-sufficiency, comparing transmission under high- and low-self-sufficiency regimes.
• Transmission mechanisms. Tax-base shrinkage measured by tax density, and the pure-tax fiscal gap, as institutional transmission channels.
• Robustness. Outcome replacement, sample adjustment, confounder control, and alternative clustering and standard-error specifications.

The work concludes with recommendations for sub-provincial fiscal system reform and non-tax revenue governance.