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By examining comparatively two recent projects of university-led large-scale real estate development in South Korea and Singapore, this paper contributes to the ongoing efforts to problematise the methodological statism in the study of East Asian urbanisation, i.e., understanding it as a process dominated by state actors, on the one hand, and to challenge the perspective that university-led real estate projects are a neoliberal strategy as conventionally understood in the West on the other. To this end, this paper uses qualitative research methods to investigate how and why East Asian universities participate in real estate development projects; how the universities pursue their material goals by negotiating with the state, which is known to have led condensed urbanisation and industrialisation in East Asia (Global East). This paper concludes that speculative real estate development activities of East Asian universities are variegated based on their developmental legacies and need to be understood as more nuanced processes. The case studies demonstrate that East Asian universities have worked beyond their social roles by directly participating in the urban process, pursuing the accumulation of real estate assets that would eventually undermine their public role as educational institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the impacts of carbon pricing policies on firms' greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We include two carbon pricing policies: carbon tax and emission trading scheme (ETS) at national and sub-national (province) levels, measured as policy existence (binary variable) and carbon price (continuous variable). Firms' GHG emissions are measured as total emissions and emission intensity. Using unique recent firm-level data from 2010 to 2021 from three East Asia countries (Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK), and the People's Republic of China (PRC)), we obtain the following key findings. First, the national carbon pricing policy significantly reduced firms' GHG emissions and GHG emission intensity in Japan and the ROK. The greater the carbon price, the greater the impact. Second, the subnational carbon pricing policies implemented in two provinces of Japan (Saitama and Tokyo) decreased firms' GHG emissions. Third, heavy industry sectors such as energy, utilities, and industrials experienced a substantial decrease in GHG emission intensity due to the carbon pricing policy. Finally, our main results are robust to different model specifications and various measures of firms' GHG emissions. Although literature studying the ex-post impact of carbon pricing on emissions at country and sector-level is abundant, this paper contributes to the existing literature providing empirical evidence of the impact of carbon pricing policies on firms' emissions using firm-level data, which is highly limited especially in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]