我院牛毅老师在China Economic Review上发表论文，提供证据证明中国城市政府的预算外财政收入（土地财政收入）与预算内财政收入有着显著不同的支出方式，预算外收入更多的用于促进短期增长的基础设施建设和形象工程等方面，而对其他一些重要公共产品的供给影响很小。论文摘要如下。

The paper examines the spending preferences of local governments on land revenues by developing an indirect approach in which public sector outcomes are regressed with land revenues, the most dominant source for off-budget incomes. By doing so, we are able to overcome the issue of unavailable itemized spending data on land revenues. The behavioral foundation of leading local officials on land revenues is that they may be treated as discretionary funds that will be spent on projects that can benefit local officials' political advancements. Thus it is hypothesized that Chinese local officials intend to channel land revenues more toward growth-oriented infrastructure such as urban roads, more toward image projects such as public squares and open space, and more toward projects that help to boost public impression of local economic success on which cadre evaluation weighs heavily. We test those hypotheses using a panel data of Chinese prefecture cities from 1999 to 2006. Econometric estimates confirm those hypotheses.