Conference Agenda

As a response to local environmental regulations, it is prevalent to observe the relocations of polluting firms across cities. This paper provides evidence of the within-city relocations of polluting plants through the spatial distribution of industrial land. We utilize a unique setting of the 12th 5-year Plan on Air Pollution Prevention and Control covering 117 cities in China, among which the 47 treatment cities received more stringent regulation than the rest 70. Using a triple difference model, we find that after the implementation of the regulation, compared with the control cities, the locations of newly transacted polluting industrial land in the treatment cities become far away from the monitoring stations. The event-study results and the placebo tests using other categories of land further validate the causal relationship. The channel analysis suggests that the mechanism is through both the supply side and the demand side: while the local governments remote their industrial land supply away from the monitoring stations after the regulation, land buyers also show less tendency of bidding for the land near the monitoring stations.

Despite being a key step in buyer side housing search, onsite viewing activities receives little attention in the literature. This study analyses the information revealed by buyers’ onsite viewing activities and examines its impact on transaction outcomes. Using a proprietary dataset of housing viewing records and transaction outcomes from a large real estate agency in China, we show that more active onsite viewings of prospective buyers are associated with greater deal likelihoods and purchase prices, as well as higher likelihood of budget overrun. We establish causality using the instrumental variable approach, exploiting the national basketball game period as an exogenous shock to onsite viewings. We further show that the demand revelation channel as a dominant mechanism driving the result. Active onsite viewings reveal buyers’ housing demand, which results in weakened bargaining power in negotiations with sellers, and consequently higher purchase prices that exceed buyers’ budgets.

We construct a set of monthly and quarterly home price indices (HPIs) of seventeen areas (cities and counties) of Taiwan from July 2012 to July 2018 based on Shiller (2008) repeat sales method. All seventeen areas exhibit significant upward trends during the sample period. Significantly larger price increases in less-developed areas such as Hualien-Taitung (+140%), Chiayi (+105%), Changhua (+95%), Ilan (+85%) compare to Taipei (+25%), the most developed area in Taiwan. Standard time series analysis suggests that all monthly HPIs have unit roots, 13 out of 17 HPIs are integrated of order 1 to 4. Twelve out of seventeen HPIs are cointegrated of order 4 with the composite housing index of Taiwan. In an error-correction model, coefficients of the error correction term are negative for all HPIs, implying convergence to the long-run equilibrium. The average speed of adjustment equals -0.614 with the highest speed of -1.05 in Hsinchu and lowest speed of -0.109 in Taoyuan. We explore the possibility that such a housing price dynamics maybe associated with ageing population ageing (Mankiw & Weil, 1989) through the unique Chinese culture and housing market regulations, after controlling for effects of unemployment and population growth

This research explores how local politician tenure affects local debt risks. Employing the prefecture-level databases of local politician tenure and Chengtou Bond issuance of local government financing vehicles in China over the period 2003-2018, this paper finds that the local debt risks is negatively correlated with the mayors’ or city CCP secretaries’ tenure. However, the prefecture governments issue more bonds for infrastructure and industrial parks investment in the early stage of mayors’ tenure, which augments local debt risks. In addition, political uncertainty and central political supervision escalate local debt risks, but curb the over-indebtedness behavior of local governors.