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Urban development relies heavily on labour, while the change in urban housing prices, in turn, has a crucial impact on labour. Therefore, the regulatory policies of housing prices have become a critical content of urban management worldwide for a long time. Based on the theoretical analysis of urban housing prices and labour mobility, we use fixed-effect panel model with the panel data of 281 cities in China from 2002 to 2018. We study the impact of rising urban housing prices on labour and identify the housing price jump as an instrumental variable in solving the endogenous problem. The results are as follows. First, the increase in urban housing prices has a crowding-out effect on labour mobility. Second, there is a moderating effect on different levels of education, urban construction, and income under the impact of urban housing prices on labour mobility. Third, the heterogeneity of the impact is reflected in the housing price-to-income ratios and industrial structures. These conclusions are supposed to have significant enlightenment for controlling the urban housing prices during high-quality economic growth and guiding labour flow more rationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the full integration of digital information technology and financial services, digital finance has developed rapidly. As there are significant differences in the development level of FinTech and traditional financial sectors in different cities, it is important to evaluate the development level of urban digital finance. This study aimed to compile an index of urban digital finance to present an accurate and in-depth depiction of how urban digital finance has developed in China. Our sample covers 278 cities in China, over the period 2010--2020. This paper firstly constructs the urban digital financial index system from the three dimensions of digital financial services, digital financial technology, and digital financial operating environment, and then adopts a combination of subjective and objective methods to measure the urban digital financial index. This paper study revealed that China's urban digital finance has been on an upward trend from 2010 to 2020, and the digital finance operating environment is an important driving force for the growth of the urban digital finance index. The convergence of China's urban digital finance is decreasing, indicating that the gap in digital financial development between cities is increasing. Urban digital finance has positive spatial agglomeration, but this spatial agglomeration is decreasing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a comprehensive energy transition reform strategy, China's new energy demonstration city (NEDC) pilot policy aims to accelerate the transformation from a fossil fuel-based energy system to a more sustainable energy system. Employing unique data on firms' energy consumption from National Tax Survey Database, this paper investigates how NEDC policy affects firms' energy utilization efficiency based on the difference-in-differences model. We observe that NEDC construction reduces firms' energy consumption intensity (ECI) in the pilot cities. After using the instrumental variable approach to deal with endogeneity problems, the conclusions still hold. The mechanism analysis reveals that the decrease in firms' ECI is driven by offering more tax incentives to enterprises and prompting them to pursue technological innovation. Heterogeneity analysis shows that this negative impact is more prominent for SOEs and high-energy-consuming enterprises; we also observe that this effect is more pronounced for firms in resource-based cities and old-industrial-based cities. Our results provide policy implications for initiating policies in other countries to improve firms' energy utilization performance. • NEDC pilot policy affects firms' energy utilization efficiency. • NEDC construction reduces firms' energy consumption intensity (ECI). • Tax incentives and technological innovation are the channels that cut firms' ECI. • This negative impact is more prominent for SOEs and high-energy-consuming firms. • This effect is more pronounced in resource-based and old-industrial-based cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]