This study employs a difference-in-difference (DID) regression to estimate the impact of high-speed rail (HSR) on city-level household carbon dioxide emissions across various consumption categories. The DID analysis is based on a sample of 179 Chinese cities during 2010-2018, and reveals a positive association between HSR and household carbon dioxide emissions. The findings suggest that cities with HSR emit more carbon dioxide due to increased daily consumption, and this effect grows over time. The mechanism analysis shows that the development of HSR stimulates household income growth, leading to increased consumption-based carbon dioxide in cities with HSR. Despite being considered a green transportation mode with a low carbon footprint, this research highlights potential environmental burdens associated with HSR, emphasizing the need for sustainable HSR development and environmental management policies.

The complex interactions among multiple service providers pose challenges to the delivery of community care for older people. Through the lens of the welfare pluralism theory, this study provides the first understanding of older people’s decisions regarding informal/community care under complex interactions among the government, enterprises, communities, and families. Based on a survey of older people in 2883 corresponding families and 184 communities in China, we utilize a logit regression to empirically examine the factors that influence older people’s care decisions, as identified by an equilibrium model. We find that government subsidies and local wage levels effectively promote older people’s decisions to utilize community care. We highlight the importance of governments’ direct care provisions in promoting aging in place and efforts to mitigate regional inequalities for older people.

Kinship networks play an important role in sharing risk under insufficient social security. We examine the heterogeneous risk-sharing networks and their impacts on household finance. Based on a staggered DID design, we find that households under negative shocks obtain a larger extent of social capital from extended family members with blood ties and geo-proximities, similar income positions, and lower uncertainty exposures. The vehicles of risk-sharing differ across networks, and direct monetary transfers over quasi-credits are facilitated by altruism and social norms. However, over-reliance on risk-sharing networks reduces willingness to engage in life-cycle financial planning and dampens long-term financial performance.

In this paper, we study consumer search in a housing market subject to objective frictions induced by intermediaries and psychological frictions intrinsic to tenants themselves. Using rental data from a leading real estate brokerage company during 2016 and 2018, we find a unimodal distribution of objective search frictions and a bimodal distribution of psychological search frictions revealed by tenants' search behaviors. This bimodal distribution originates from divergent search strategies of tenants with different search criteria. Furthermore, psychological search frictions explain the deviation between a tenant's actual choice and stated preference, and enhance the degree of overpay/mark-up in the deal. These effects of psychological frictions led by divergent search strategies hold when we consider the expertise/incentive of agents and the rigidity/opportunity cost of tenants' search. Aggregately, psychological search frictions result in a dispersed and asymmetric distribution of rent residuals.

This study examines the investment behaviour of Hong Kong-based real estate firms in Mainland China. Using a sample of individual land transactions, we find that firms with higher value of growth options, as perceived in the capital market, are more likely to invest actively and further away from their home base. However, over time, Hong Kong developers tend to decrease their level of activity in Mainland China, indicating that the ‘liability of foreignness’ becomes a significant challenge. Our findings highlight the importance of balancing strategic expansion with the inherent risks of operating in distant emerging markets.

Redevelopment in Hong Kong must be accelerated in response to urban decay and land shortages. However, due to a lack of incentives and effective policy tools under Hong Kong's floor area ratio regulations, there has been limited public-private partnerships in the urban renewal process, reducing both the public welfare and the efficiency of land use. We review the evolution of Hong Kong's density schemes for addressing urban redevelopment issues to identify the most important barriers to private sector involvement. We also summarise the international experience and identify viable policies, compare cases in Hong Kong with successful transfer of development rights (TDRs) examples, point out TDRs' shortcomings, and propose targeted policy optimisation strategies. On a practical level, this study has implications for the creation of targeted density policies to address Hong Kong's ageing infrastructure and facilitate the urban transformation of Hong Kong and similar high-density cities so that they can continue to support sustainable urban growth.

Significant fluctuations in house prices have received considerable attention in recent years. An understanding of the forces underlying the departure from fundamental values is important in explaining the mechanisms underlying housing market performance and predicting potential house price changes in the future. This study constitutes the first use of a common trend (CT) model to analyze private house prices in the Swedish market. We employ a cointegration system to analyze the macro variables of consumption expenditure per capita, user costs and house prices. We decompose shocks into those resulting from fundamental variables, specified in this research as income and the interest rate, and those resulting from cyclical variables. The results indicate that interest rates play a dominant role in explaining house price swings, and are also significant in determining user costs for households in Sweden. Transitory shocks are found to have little explanatory power for house prices and user costs in the long run. A number of tests have been performed to verify the robustness of the specification and results.

Over the past decade, China's major cities have experienced significant real estate price increase which has been fueled by the sustained growth of the economic fundamentals. It is well believed that deeper integration with the world market is one of the major reasons for such high speed macroeconomic growth. In this paper, we examined the linkage between urban economic openness, the ratio of trade volume as a percentage of GDP, and urban real estate prices basing on the quality of life theory as well as Balassa-Samuelson (B-S) effects. Using panel data of 35 large Chinese cities from the year 1998 to 2006, we empirically find that for every 1% increase in urban economic openness, urban real estate prices will increase significantly by 0.282%, after controlling for other traditional demand-supply factors. Urban economic openness alone accounted for about 15.90% appreciations of Chinese real estate prices during the sample period, which is not neglectable. This result implies that urban real estate price fluctuations are potentially affected by international economic factors. The economic distance to the international market could be deemed as productive and consumption amenity for a city as well. This study enriches the perception of quality of life factors, and furthermore provides a new perspective for understanding the real estate price dynamics in the globalized economic development today.

Housing affordability has long been on the agenda of China’s policy makers. Imperfections in the housing system and growing disparities in income and wealth have been central to the problem of affordable housing. Housing reforms in China led to the creation of a market-oriented housing system, but also increased economic and social stratification. This article considers the effect of privatization of public housing on the problem of housing affordability in Beijing. We draw on a household survey to assess affordability for households according to occupants’ family structures, educational attainments and employment status, using a ‘residual income’ approach. The implications for policies designed to improve housing affordability are discussed.

Facilitating home ownership and providing more affordable housing has received considerable attention in urban China. However, it remains a challenge to develop better measurements of affordability due to the income disparity and housing inequality in Beijing. In this study, a new measure of affordability is defined by residual income. Therefore, a minimum required budget for a family to purchase a “standard” unit is deduced by accounting for the basic necessities and financial loans. This paper also discusses the deficiencies of the implemented “Economic Housing Plan” on bridging the housing affordability gap.