Conference Agenda

Premium public educational resources are scarce, and their accessibility is usually associated with the ownership and location of residential property in many countries such as China. With the aims of improving equality in allocating educational resources and suppressing the rapid growth of housing prices in the school zones of high-ranked public schools, the Beijing government rolled out its six-year-one-position and multi-dicing policies, which undermine the association between residential property ownership and public school enrolment. These two policies provide an ideal experimental setting that adopts a spatial difference-in-differences design to investigate whether geographically equalizing educational resources can improve housing affordability. We find that implementing these two policies reduces housing prices by 2.4% to 2.9% in implementing districts in general and by 4.4% to 7.9% in the school zones of high-ranked public primary schools. Further, we identify a panic buying effect caused by the announcement of the two policies, which leads to an increase in housing prices in the school zones of high-ranked public schools and policy-implementing districts in general before implementation.

This paper matches Chinese industrial firm data from 1998 to 2012 with Chinese firm pollutant emission data to obtain polluting firms' addresses, then gets polluting firms' latitude and longitude information from the Baidu map API interface by web crawler technology. We use the LWR approach to estimate pollutant emissions for China at the local level. Mapping the latitude and longitude of the firms to the 100km × 100km equal-sized grids, we fit the pollutant emission curve using the interpolation method to derive pollutant emissions for each grid centroid. The indices for wastewater discharge, COD, and SO₂ show similar decreasing trends from 1998 to 2012, and COD and SO₂ indices dropped more than the wastewater index. The spatial pollutant emissions analyses indicate that pollution was relatively low. However, the pollutant level decreases more in the east than in the west region. The regression results show that the pollutant indices increased during the 10th Five-Year Plan period but decreased during the 11th Five-Year Plan period. The eastern region experiences smaller changes than the central and western regions.

This paper reveals an informal eldercare arrangement in China by focusing on how the value of housing owned by aging parents affects adult children’s caregiving behavior. Using three waves of comprehensive national survey data from 2011 to 2015, we find that when the potential housing-bequest value increases, children tend to provide more emotional support for their parents, which demonstrates the role of the intergenerational-exchange mechanism based on housing bequests in China’s current eldercare arrangement. However, we also raise concerns about its sustainability. The mechanism also tends to be less effective among only-child households, especially under the prevalent social norms about aging parents’ son preference. Therefore, we still call for more market-oriented arrangements to face the increasing challenges of the aging society.

This paper examines the impact of sustained air pollution on various categories of online consumption using a proprietary panel dataset covering 70 million online consumers in 291 Chinese cities from 2017 to 2019. To establish a causal relationship, we exploit plausibly exogenous variations in air quality resulting from China's Huai River heating policy. Our findings, based on difference-in-differences estimations, reveal that during the heating season, health-related consumption increases by 7.3%, consumption of necessities increases by 8.0%, and consumption of non-essential goods decreases by 3.5% at the Seller-BuyerCity-Month level. Aggregating the data to the BuyerCity-Year level and using a two-stage least square regression discontinuity design, we find significantly larger causal effects. Finally, our analysis indicates that avoidance behavior and negative mood, identified through online keyword search indices on "air pollution" and "mood", jointly contribute to the observed changes in online consumption.