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While the Paris Agreement and 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are the two most important global governance agendas, in practice they have been implemented in isolation. This calls for the need to focus on the potential policy synergies between emission reduction policies and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper therefore aims to explore whether the emissions trading scheme (ETS) policy-one of the most effective ways to fulfill the target determined by the Paris Agreement, would facilitate reducing income inequality (SDG10). By combining a difference-in-difference estimation and propensity score matching technique based on a balanced panel dataset for 31 Chinese provinces from 2010 to 2018, we quantify the impact of ETS policy on income inequality between urban and rural areas in China. The results demonstrate that compared with the regions without ETS, the Theil index between rural and urban areas with ETS decreased by 0.018 on average in China. In addition, the ETS would perform better in regions with low urbanization level and high coal dependence. Hence it is vital to speed up the establishment of a unified ETS market in China. This is particularly true for inner underdeveloped regions in China. These findings proven to be robust according to a series of tests challenge the view that SDG 10 has the least relevance to climate action and suggest rethinking the effectiveness and applicability of ETS. Therefore, our research can not only serve as a reference for the development of ETS in China and elsewhere, but also inform decision makers who are seeking for policy synergies between the Paris Agreement and SDGs.

Primary and secondary education, provided by the local governments in China, plays an important role in attracting talented migrants. The race for talent and the education assessment from the top e...

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted the urban real estate market around the world. This study regards the impact of the pandemic as a quasi-natural experiment, using the Difference in Difference model (DID) to examine the short-term impact of this severe public health crisis on the residential land and housing markets in the Yangtze River Delta. The study found that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant inhibitory effect on the average price of urban residential land and houses in the Yangtze River Delta. Although the currency oversupply has caused real estate prices in all cities to rise, the price of urban residential land decreased by 13.7% for each additional unit of epidemic severity. The greater the city’s resilience to the pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic, the faster its residential land prices will recover. Empirical research on the new house samples confirmed this conclusion. Local governments should continue to improve their ability to manage abnormal conditions, not only to prevent the spread of the epidemic, but also to gradually promote the recovery of the urban economy, strengthen urban resilience to better respond to health crises, and achieve sustainable urban development.

The Housing Provident Fund System (HPFS) was established in China in the 1990s as a welfare program to offer low-cost loans and encourage the purchasing of houses. However, there has been some controversy over the income redistribution effect of HPFS. Previous studies focused on the effect of low-interest-rate loans but ignored the effects of tax exemptions and low-interest-rate deposits. This paper introduces a lifetime cash flow model which considers the effects of low-interest-rate loans, tax exemptions, and low-interest-rate deposits together. It compares the internal rate of return (IRR) for typical employees with different incomes in four situations: whether or not HPFS participation and whether or not house purchasing. We found that the IRRs of the typical low-income HPFS participants who buy houses with HPFS loans were lower than the IRRs of non-participants who buy houses with commercial mortgages without HPFS participation. For the typical middle-income employees, there is not much difference in IRR between the two situations. Only the typical high-income employees can benefit from HPFS participation, and this is mostly due to the effect of the tax exemptions, rather than the effect of low-interest-rate loans. Increasing the coverage of HPFS and HPFS loans among low-income employees will not improve the income redistribution effect of HPFS.

The removal and reconstruction of urban villages can improve the residential environment in the vicinity and promote the willingness of buyers to pay. A detailed investigation of the price effects on nearby housing generated by urban village redevelopment helps to capture the added value of public investment. Previous studies often ignore the temporal variation of the price effects. Furthermore, they confuse the price effects from the removal of dilapidated housing and the construction of new buildings. Based on the listing prices in 2017–2018 and transaction data in 2015 of secondhand residential housing in Hangzhou, China, this paper built a multi-period difference-in-differences model to examine the multi-period price effects from urban village redevelopment on nearby housing and to isolate the removal effects of old buildings and the amenity effects of reconstruction. The results show that (1) An anticipatory effect of up to 13% occurs before the urban village redevelopment; removal and reconstruction will bring a total premium of 20% to nearby housing prices; and the total price effects gradually increase in time and slightly fall back after four years. (2) Less than 15% of the added value comes from the removal of dilapidated housing in an urban village, while more than 85% comes from the reconstruction of new buildings. (3) The price effects of large-scale urban village redevelopment are much more obvious.

Environmental pollution incidents affect urban residents and the natural environment. This article employs hedonic price models and a difference-in-difference (DID) approach to examine how...

This paper studies signaling behaviors in marital matching. As some of males' essential traits for marriage are hardly observable, a high-quality male is motivated to signal. This paper applies a modified Spence signaling model to the marriage market and tests the theoretical implications with survey data from rural China. We find that houses are primary signals in marriage markets in China, which explains both the high homeownership and the large housing sizes. We find 1) marriageable males are twice as much likely to build a house five years before marriage than five years after, while females do not behave the same way, 2) housing size is reflective of males' unobservable characteristics, especially in villages with high interest rates. Males with more social connections, higher income rank and greater wealth build larger houses. And 3) a ten-square-meter larger house reduces a male's probability of singlehood by 0.8% at the age of 30, and enables him to marry a wife 0.1 cm taller.

This study investigates the property price premium brought by the opening of a subway to illustrate temporal dynamics and heterogeneous mechanism of property value effects. The estimation of changes caused by subways on property value can aid in assessing the benefits of public transit investments well. On the basis of residential property transaction records in Hangzhou, China in 2009–2013, hedonic models in a difference-in-differences framework are applied to handle certain endogeneity problems of estimation by eliminating unobserved factors. Results show that treatment groups located within 1000 m of a subway have an average price increase of 444 yuan per m2 from the opening of Line1. High-cost houses constantly gain significant increment and their price premium regress during the research period. However, for their counterparts in low-cost communities, the insignificant price effects are negative for a short time, and then become positive. The generalized results are robust when subway radius is adjusted.

A quality promotion of neighborhood primary schools no doubt elevates nearby housing price. But which houses benefit from the public policy is important to improve educational equity. Accurate identification of such capitalization effects will help policymakers optimize the allocation of scarce public goods. Previous studies on this issue have been biased due to endogeneity and overlooking the impacts of facility quality change. Based on the Hangzhou's school district adjustment in 2012, the current work contributes to housing price effects of policies and education quality changes, rather than a static educational facility. The difference-in-differences model with quantile regression is constructed to obtain a more precise and detailed estimation among the different sub-markets. Results show that the average price effect estimated by the difference-in-differences is up to nearly 800 yuan/m2, higher than cross-sectional estimation. Only housing with better schools after reassignment witness a price premium. Low-priced and small houses earn more than 1000 yuan/m2, whereas high-priced and large houses are not significantly affected. The results demonstrate that future policies should ensure the rights of low-income groups to attend high quality primary school and guard against the gentrification of low-priced houses.

Urban village redevelopment has become an attractive way to supply land for municipal governments in China. However, the subsequent process of housing resettlement can change the status of the housing wealth of indigenous villagers. Extant studies on urban village redevelopment tend to focus on informal housing development and its impact on the housing choices of low wage migrants. However, relatively little research pertains to the housing differentiation of villagers during redevelopment. This paper examined the change and disparity to the housing wealth of local villagers under redevelopment based on a comparative study on two typical cases in Wuhan, China: a case of government-led redevelopment with compensation baselines, and a case self-organized market-driven redevelopment. Empirical results confirmed that there were downward and upward trends in housing wealth with government-led redevelopment and self-organized redevelopment, respectively. Government-led resettlement baselines helped to alleviate housing disparity among villagers caused by informal development. However, this disparity was not exacerbated by self-organized redevelopment based on market forces. Overall, housing disparity was not alleviated by redevelopment. We conclude that adopting well-designed policies and suitable modes of redevelopment will help to mitigate the growing disparity among villagers caused by informal housing development, and to alleviate the housing wealth inequality within villages.

This paper examines the effectiveness of construction land quotas as a tool for managing urban expansion in China. Applying a difference-in-difference approach to panel data from 2006 to 2010 in 243 Chinese cities, it was found that construction land quotas were not always enforced. Although one-third of the Chinese cities exceeded their quota limits, quotas were effective in reducing annual urban expansion in all cities by an average of 70 ha. This effect was most pronounced in cities where quotas were binding. In the 72 cities with binding quotas, urban land expansion was reduced by an average of 269 ha annually after quota implementation. In total, quotas were attributed with the protection of 26,530 ha of land from urban expansion during the study period.

This paper studies how political cycles change the mix of industrial and residential land in urban land leasing. The mixture of different types of land leasing in cities affects urban landscape, resident welfare, and economic sustainability. Using prefecture-level panel data from China and statistical regressions, this paper finds that cities lease out 3% more industrial land, as a percentage of total annual urban land leasing, when their party committee secretaries have been in office for no more than two years. In the same period, they lease out 2% less residential land. This is explained by the strategic behaviors of party committee secretaries to increase their chances of political promotion. Urban land leasing fuels local economic performance and increases the chance of city leaders&rsquo, promotion. While the economic benefits of residential land are immediate, those of industrial land cannot be reaped until two years later. This divided timeline results in more aggressive leasing of industrial land early on in party committee secretaries&rsquo, service terms, and that of residential land later on. Mayors&rsquo, service terms do not have the same effect. This political cycle distorts the temporal and spatial distributions of industrial and residential land in cities, and results in inefficient land use and unstable real estate markets.

Most existing studies empirically investigated the impact of rail transit on housing prices using the traditional hedonic price model, which is based on ordinary least squares (OLS). This method can estimate only the average implicit prices of housing characteristics and may ignore possible heterogeneous impacts of rail transit at different housing price levels. As a useful supplement to OLS regression, quantile regression can measure how implicit prices of explanatory variables vary across different price levels, thereby providing a comprehensive picture of the relationship between housing characteristics and prices. By using Hangzhou, China as an example, this study adopts the traditional hedonic price model and quantile regression model to investigate the capitalization effect of a new subway line on housing prices. Empirical results suggest the significant impacts of accessibility to subway stations. The average housing price within 2 km of the station is 2.1% to 6.1% higher than those outside. We also find that the impacts of the subway differ significantly across the distribution of housing prices, wherein the absolute value of estimated coefficients increased from 0.023 for the 15th quantile to 0.086 for the 95th quantile. The subway opening strengthens the capitalization effect of traffic accessibility. The absolute value of price elasticity increases from 0.044 to 0.053, and the range of influence is expanded from 1500 m to 2000 m.

Rural settlement containment is a challenging issue for many countries. It becomes especially daunting when people want rural settlements to serve multiple social goals. For example, in China, the central government seeks to simultaneously achieve three goals with the rural homestead management system. It wishes to: (1) contain rural settlements to preserve farmland; (2) entitle rural households to free homestead; and (3) encourage rural residents to accrue monetary income from homesteads. This paper, using survey data from 54 villages in China, shows that these three policy goals are an impossible combination. In fact, the latter two encourage settlement expansion. Moreover, with the latter two in place, we find that rural cadres expand homesteads more aggressively than others, exacerbating social and economic inequality within rural communities.

In this study, we examine how rural land rental markets in China are changing the distribution of land among villagers of different incomes. To uncover the impact of land rental markets on land distribution, we first employ the Gini coefficient as a measure of changes in land holdings before and after the emergence of land rental markets. We then use multivariate analysis to examine how land rental market activity differs by income groups within villages. Results indicate that disparity within villages is increasing in the form of land rental market 'land grabs', implying that land rental markets are not a tool to reduce land disparity in rural China. rsp3_1074 301..315