Conference Agenda

A growing number of studies have concluded that human capital is an important factor in regional innovation and economic development. However, the housing difficulties triggered by high housing prices may push talents out of cities, resulting in brain drain, which is detrimental to the innovative development of cities themselves. Since the year of 2017, many cities in China have developed various policies, including talent housing policies to attract talent under the dual pressure of an aging population and inter-city competition, staging a “war for talent”. Existing studies have evaluated the policy effectiveness of talent policies, but there is no consensus in academia on the impact of talent policies on labor mobility at different levels. Some scholars believe that biased talent policies will increase the scale of regional human capital and optimize the human capital structure by attracting high-level talents, which in turn will have an impact on regional innovation efficiency and innovation output. Others point out that there is complementarity between ordinary labor and high-skilled labor, and there is a tendency for high-skilled labor and ordinary labor to flow in the same direction. Based on the perspective of heterogeneous labor mobility, this paper examined the impact of talent housing policies on human capital using DID model, and further analyzed how such housing policy favoring high-skilled labor ultimately affect regional innovation by using a mediating effects model. The results of the study suggest that talent housing policies have different effects in the long and short term, and that skill complementarities among the labor force may eventually offset policy effects to the detriment of regional innovation development.

Little is known about the circumstances of refugees in the magic mix housing complex, how they respond to residing in the diverse community environment, how they develop social relationships, and acquire local language and cultural knowledge in such setting. Drawing on qualitative data from three case studies of magic mix social housing projects in Utrecht and Nieuwegein, where refugees and local residents are accommodated together, this paper investigates the living experience of refugee status holders with a five-year or permanent residence permit, and addresses how magic mix influences the social integration of refugees in terms of social interaction, friendship ties, language learning, and sense of belonging. Results show that different settings of magic mix influence refugees’ social integration in different ways. To what extent magic mix successfully contributes to refugees’ social integration depends on physical environmental factors such as communal space, neighborhood amenities, housing quality, as well as social environmental factors such as social activities, social media, the composition of residents, self-organization and management, and the professional organization. Implications for housing policy of these findings are discussed.

Homeowners are found to be relatively less mobile across geographic locations and experience longer unemployment than renters in the literature. This paper examines the relation between homeownership and the commuting time to work. Using data from Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we find strong evidence that homeowners on average spend 6.9 percent more time in commuting to work than renters after controlling for a wide range of household demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, and geographic location. Our results are robust to endogeneity issue of homeownership, time-invariant & time-variant unobservable household characteristics, and functional misspecifications. In addition, we examine the heterogeneous impacts of homeownership and find that the impact is larger among households living in metropolitan areas, black and non-white households, and households with low income and wealth. Subsidizing homeownership in the U.S. is often justified on the grounds that homeownership generates significant economic and social benefits, and the paper contributes to the literature by providing a new insight into one of the potential negative externalities brought by homeownership: longer commutes to work.

The number of dilapidated urban settlements in China is very large and widely distributed. It is very difficult to carry out the existing urban settlement planning. This paper explored the spatial distribution of urban settlement dilapidation, and put forward targeted regeneration suggestions for different kinds of urban settlements. The research scale is divided into three levels: single settlement, street and the whole city. At the single settlement level, the "Pressure-State-Response" framework is used to construct the dilapidated degree evaluation index system. The weight is determined by AHP-entropy weight method. The dilapidated degree of urban settlements at the street level is evaluated by the median dilapidated degree of urban settlements and Shannon diversity index. The exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) method is used to construct the spatial distribution model of dilapidated degree of urban settlements at the whole city level. The geographic detector model is used to explore the reasons of spatial distribution of dilapidated degree. In this paper, Harbin in China is chosen as an example. The results showed that the dilapidated degree at the single settlement and street levels took the city center within the Second Ring Road as the core, showing a radial downward trend. The dilapidated degree of urban settlements in Harbin is agglomeration. The H-H agglomeration areas are concentrated and contiguous in space, and the number of such areas is the largest. These areas are mainly located within the Second Ring Road, which the urban settlements are most serious dilapidated. Among the sixteen influencing factors, nine factors have the significant impacts on the spatial distribution of dilapidated degree of urban settlements. Factors with significant influence, and the influencing degree is from high to low are including dilapidated degree aggregation characteristics, traffic accessibility, government financial capacity, urban settlement development intensity, educational land accessibility, residential land, dilapidated degree diversity, land transaction volume, official land accessibility, and population density. Finally, this paper provided some implications from the time dimension, space dimension and system level for governance of the dilapidated urban settlements.