Siqi Zheng

• PhD
• Managing Director at Tsinghua University

Urban outputs, from economy to innovation, are known to grow as a power of a city's population. But, since large cities tend to be central in transportation and communication networks, the effects attributed to city size may be confounded with those of intercity connectivity. Here, we map intercity networks for the world's two largest economies (th...

This paper examines the impact of transboundary vegetation fire smoke on the real-time sentiment of Twitter users in Southeast Asia, including countries such as Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. We leverage the exogenous variation in wind directions for identification. We find that an increase in upwind fir...

Promoting well-being is one of the key targets of the Sustainable Development Goals at the United Nations. Many national and city governments worldwide are incorporating Subjective Well-Being (SWB) indicators into their agenda, to complement traditional objective development and economic metrics. In this study, we introduce the Twitter Sentiment Ge...

Linkages between climate and human activity are often calibrated at daily or monthly resolutions, which lacks the granularity to observe intraday adaptation behaviors. Ignoring this adaptation margin could mischaracterize the health consequences of future climate change. Here, we construct an hourly outdoor leisure activity database using billions...

COVID-19, as a global health crisis, has triggered the fear emotion with unprecedented intensity. Besides the fear of getting infected, the outbreak of COVID-19 also created significant disruptions in people’s daily life and thus evoked intensive psychological responses indirect to COVID-19 infections. In this study, we construct a panel expressed...

We explore the potential of incorporating accessibility analysis in addressing the impact of subway expansions on the real estate market. We first demonstrate that by using increases in accessibility to jobs as a continuous treatment variable, rather than adopting a binary station dummy approach, we achieve better goodness-of-fit in a quasi-experim...

Commuting is a key mechanism that governs the dynamics of cities. Despite its importance, very little is known of the properties and mechanisms underlying this crucial urban process. Here, we capitalize on $\sim$ 50 million individuals' smartphone data from 234 Chinese cities to show that urban commuting obeys remarkable regularities. These regular...

The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented burdens on people’s physical health and subjective well-being. While countries worldwide have developed platforms to track the evolution of COVID-19 infections and deaths, frequent global measurements of affective states to gauge the emotional impacts of pandemic and related policy interventions remai...

The surprise economic shutdown due to COVID-19 caused a sharp improvement in urban air quality in many previously heavily polluted Chinese cities. If clean air is a valued experience good, then this short-term reduction in pollution in spring 2020 could have persistent medium-term effects on reducing urban pollution levels as cities adopt new “blue...

Significance When the COVID-19 pandemic ends and it becomes safe to resume economic behavior, we will need to find effective ways of communicating that it is truly safe to do so. In this study, we tested a simple “nudge” that informed people of the proportion of their neighbors who were planning to visit a restaurant over the weekend, so that those...

Urban leaders in areas with high air pollution often face the dual task of reducing pollution levels while educating the public about the health impacts of pollution and preventive measures. Transportation policies to cut motorized personal vehicle use are often a key part of pollution reduction efforts. One type of these policies is information in...

This study analyzes the influence of pedestrianization of urban space on the revenues of surrounding retail stores. Pedestrianization refers to the conversion of street use from vehicles to a walkable environment. We compiled a unique transaction dataset containing the estimates of sales volumes for stores across Spain and combine it with data from...

BACKGROUND COVID-19, as a global health crisis, has triggered the fear emotion with unprecedented intensity. Besides the fear of getting infected, the outbreak of COVID-19 also created significant disruptions in people’s daily life and thus evoked intensive psychological responses indirect to COVID-19 infections. OBJECTIVE This study aims to devel...

Our paper aims to examine the healthy building adoption patterns by first asking two critical questions that are relevant to the market conditions: What are healthy buildings? What is their financial value for tenants and owners? We then synthesize the existing academic and industry literature. We find some early evidence of a real estate price pre...

Our paper aims to examine the healthy building adoption patterns by first asking two critical questions that are relevant to the market conditions: What are healthy buildings? What is their financial value for tenants and owners? We then synthesize the existing academic and industry literature. We find some early evidence of a real estate price pre...

Previous literature suggests that active commuting has substantial health benefits. Yet, in polluted regions, it can also cause additional health risks by increasing riders' pollution exposure and raising their inhalation rate. We examine the effect of perceived air pollution on stated commuting choices using an on-site survey experiment for 2285 n...

As the COVID-19 pandemic comes to an end, governments find themselves facing a new challenge: motivating citizens to resume economic activity. What is an effective way to do so? We investigate this question using a field experiment in the city of Zhengzhou, China immediately following the end of the city's COVID-19 lockdown. Using self-reports and...

As the COVID-19 pandemic comes to an end, governments find themselves facing a new challenge: motivating citizens to resume economic activity. What is an effective way to do so? We investigate this question using a field experiment in the city of Zhengzhou, China immediately following the end of the city's COVID-19 lockdown. Using self-reports and...

In this study, we examine how China’s home purchase restrictions (HPR) affect recent graduate students’ job search behavior. Using administrative records of all graduate students from Tsinghua University in China in the period 2006–2016, we find that HPR significantly discourages migrant students from accepting job offers in Beijing by 6.0 percenta...

Over the past 30 years, China has experienced unprecedented economic growth spurred by large-scale rural-urban migration, industrialization, and strong global demand for its cheaply produced goods. This paper argues that an abundant supply of informal housing helped accommodate huge migrant inflows and contain labor costs. By constructing a unique...

Using 23-year panel data of cross-border venture capital investment and global air network expansion as a natural experiment, this paper investigates the effect of air travel on cross-border capital mobility. We find international airlines have a significant facilitating effect on venture capital mobility. Based on the difference-in-differences est...

The exposure to extremely high temperatures varies across population groups. Those with better adaptation strategies (such as air conditioning) suffer less. This paper combines China's daily mean temperature data with comprehensive national survey data at the household level and estimates the relationship between high-temperature exposure and adapt...

Evaluating the environmental effects of the transportation infrastructure is vitally important. Many studies have verified the effects imposed by intra-city rail transit (metro, light rail or subway) on air pollution, but seldom pay attention to the environmental effect of inter-city railway. This paper takes the high-speed railway (HSR) in China,...

Over a period of more than three decades, the Chinese government has created more than 1,400 new industrial parks, which have played a key role in creating manufacturing jobs and in attracting foreign direct investment, both nationally and locally. Provincial leaders who choose the location of such parks have political career incentives to select s...

Transportation network plays a critical role in reshaping the spatial geographical economy in terms of population, urban form, output and so on. But the impact of transportation on capital mobility is seldom revealed. Using venture capital investment events and airline network as well as high-speed rail network in China, this paper examines the eff...

Using high‐speed railway construction as a natural experiment, this paper contributes to our understanding of how passenger‐oriented transportation infrastructure affects inter‐regional trade. The findings show that trade value increases and market segmentation decreases with HSR expansion, indicating that movement of people fosters movement of fre...

The rapid urbanization of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is assumed to generate greater economic benefits in terms of income, but also result in greater social costs in terms of negative externalities. This chapter focuses on the direct relationship between city growth and the urban diseases of congestion and pollution in the PRC. The ‘demand...

In this paper, we examine the impact of air pollution on the job location choice of a highly educated labor force. Using the administrative job contract records of all graduates from Tsinghua University from 2005 to 2016, we find that air pollution significantly reduces the probability of elite graduates accepting job offers in a polluted city. Spe...

Cities offer a large menu of possible employment and leisure opportunities. The gains from such consumer city leisure are likely to be lower on more polluted days. We study the association between daily consumption activity and outdoor air pollution in China and find evidence in favor of the hypothesis that clean air and leaving one's home for leis...

High levels of air pollution in China may contribute to the urban population’s reported low level of happiness1–3. To test this claim, we have constructed a daily city-level expressed happiness metric based on the sentiment in the contents of 210 million geotagged tweets on the Chinese largest microblog platform Sina Weibo4–6, and studied its dynam...

Big cities often witness land price outgrowing structure price. For such cities this paper derives two predictions regarding the dynamics between house prices, rent and structure age. First, older houses have a higher price growth rate than younger ones, even after controlling for location and other attributes; second, the age depreciation of house...

Home prices have surged in major Chinese cities, leading to concerns of asset price bubbles and housing affordability. The policy of home purchase restrictions (HPR) has been one of China’s harshest housing market interventions to squeeze out speculative demand and dampen the soaring home prices. Beijing was the first city to implement the HPR. Emp...

During a period of extraordinary urban growth, China's per-capita carbon footprint could soar. A growth in households' willingness to purchase "green" products and to engage in voluntary restraint could help offset this pollution increase as the free market will design products to cater to this group of consumers. We study whether Chinese urbanites...

China's GHG emissions are attributed to urban economic activities, and this share is expected to rise given China's fast urbanization process. This paper provides estimates of city-level industrial CO2 emissions and their growth rates for all 287 Chinese prefecture-level and above cities during the years 1998–2009. We decompose the CO2 emission cha...

Urban China's high level of ambient air pollution lowers quality of life and raises mortality risk. China's wealthy can purchase private products such as portable room air filters that offset some of their pollution exposure risk. Using a unique data set of Internet purchases, we document that households invest more in masks and air filter products...

Parents compete for high-quality education for their children by enrolling them in good schools. However, in a Chinese mega-city like Beijing, three factors jointly lead to the spatial separation between schools and homes: the centralized public goods provision mechanism, the historical dependency in school location, and the constrained supply of h...

China’s urban housing market dynamics suggest that evolving investor confidence may be a relevant demand shifter. Such investors are continually updating their beliefs about the state of the macro economy and the policy uncertainty related to national and local housing policies. We build a 35 Chinese city real estate confidence index that varies ov...

Spatial inequality refers to unequal access to local public services between high- and low-income households in relation to their residential locations. We examine two hypotheses regarding the role of income sorting and land-use conditions in shaping spatial inequality in Chinese cities, where residents have little direct influence on local public...

To explain the weak demand for green housing in Chinese cities, researchers point to the lack of reliable and accurate information to convince owners to invest, yet there is little concrete evidence that such information would in fact promote homebuyers' investment in green housing. We implement an information experiment in Beijing. We select two p...

While numerous studies have shown that rail transit investment increases property value close to stations, not much has been said on the transit-induced indirect changes in neighborhood amenities and their role in property market's response to transit investment. The rapid expansion of Beijing's subway system over the last decade provides a preciou...

85% of China's GHG emissions are attributed to urban economic activities, and this share is expected to rise given China's fast urbanization process. This paper provides estimates of city-level industrial CO2 emissions and their growth rates for all 287 Chinese prefecture-level and above cities during the years 1998–2009. We decompose the CO2 emiss...

Several Chinese cities have invested billions of dollars to construct new industrial parks. These place based investments solve the land assembly problem which allows many productive firms to co-locate close to each other. The resulting local economic growth creates new opportunities for real estate developers and retailers that develop properties...

A neighborhood school policy is implemented in Beijing, where public education dominates. But only home owners, rather than renters are entitled to enroll in a local public school, even when both live in a school’s attendance zone. We estimate the implicit price of school quality in Beijing’s housing market by comparing within- and out-of-zone home...

This paper studies to what extent subway demand increased after the Beijing city government imposed restrictions on private driving in October, 2008. Utilizing a pseudo-repeat sale approach in a short sample period that includes 6 months before and after this exogenous shock, we mitigate the omitted variables problem, a common limitation in existin...

This paper develops a “pseudo repeat sale” estimation sample construction procedure (ps-RS) to construct more reliable and less biased quality-controlled price indices for newly-constructed homes. The method may be useful wherever new housing development is of sufficiently large scale and homogeneous. Such circumstances characterize many emerging m...

Within an open system of cities, compensating differentials theory predicts that local real estate prices will be higher in cities with higher quality non-market local public goods. In this case, more polluted cities will feature lower home prices. A city’s air pollution levels depend on economic activity within the city and on cross-border polluti...

China's rapid economic growth has been fueled by industrialization and urbanization. Given its export focus, this industrialization was spatially concentrated in the coastal eastern cities. Over the last decade, a spatial transformation has taken place leading to a deindustrialization of the rich coastal cities and sharp industrial growth in the in...

This paper studies the extent to which spatial heterogeneity in housing prices is affected by housing supply in Beijing's specific context of centralized metropolitan government without local property tax. Taking data sets of residential land leases and private housing sales records from 2006 to 2008 within Beijing's metropolitan area, this paper e...

China's ongoing urban economic growth has sharply increased the population's per capita income, lowered the count of people living below the poverty line, and caused major environmental problems. We survey the growing literature investigating the causes and consequences of China's urban pollution challenges. We begin by studying how urban populatio...

Megacity growth in the developing world is fueled by a desire to access their large local labor markets. Growing megacities suffer from high levels of traffic congestion and pollution, which degrade local quality of life. Transportation technology that allows individuals to access the megacity without living within its boundaries offers potentially...

China’s extremely high levels of urban air, water and greenhouse gas emissions levels pose local and global environmental challenges. China’s urban leaders have substantial influence and discretion over the evolution of economic activity that generates such externalities. This paper examines the political economy of urban leaders’ incentives to tac...

Due to data and methodology constraints, there is a lack of good quality-controlled residential price indices publicly available in China. New home sales account for quite a large share of total home sales (87% in 2010) in Chinese cities, As a result, the standard repeat sales approach cannot be employed, as a new housing unit only appears once on...

In recent years, formal certification programs for rating and evaluating the sustainability and energy efficiency of buildings have proliferated around the world. Developers recognize that such “green labels” differentiate products and allow them to charge a price premium. China has not formally adopted such rating standards. In the absence of such...

In Beijing, the metropolitan government has made enormous place based investments to increase green space and to improve public transit. We examine the gentrification consequences of such public investments. Using unique geocoded real estate, new restaurant count data and demographic data by neighborhood, we document that the construction of the Ol...

The practice of split households among rural – urban migrants in China has persisted for more than twenty years. In this paper we compare three forms of split households, differentiated by whether the migrant’s spouse and children are left behind or have joined the migrant: sole migration, couple migration, and family migration. Our survey of fifty...

With the decline of the traditional hukou system, migrants in China have a broad set of cities to choose from. Within an open system of cities, compensating differentials theory predicts that local real estate prices will reflect the marginal valuation of non-market local public goods. More polluted cities will feature lower real estate prices. But...

With the rapid change of urban spatial structure in Chinese cites, access to jobs and amenities is increasingly valued in residential location choices. In this paper, we first examine the spatial distributions of jobs and amenities in Beijing Metropolitan Area, and find that jobs and amenities are quite centralized, supporting the mono-centric city...

China urbanization is associated with both increases in per-capita income and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper uses micro data to rank 74 major Chinese cities with respect to their household carbon footprint. We find that the “greenest” cities based on this criterion are Huaian and Suqian while the “dirtiest” cities are Daqing and Mudanjiang. E...

Using a nested multinomial logit model of car ownership and personal travel in Beijing circa 2005, this paper compares the effectiveness of different policy instruments to reduce traffic congestion and CO2 emissions. The study shows that a congestion toll is more efficient than a fuel tax in reducing traffic congestion, whereas a fuel tax is more e...

Due to the significant impacts of FAR given by the detailed planning on land development, it is common for developers to appeal to the government for adjusting FAR requirement in China. Using data on the 1999 Detailed Planning and data on the detailed planning adjustments between 1999 and 2006 in Beijing, this research shows that when giving the FA...

A team of Beijing-based urban planning specialists is joined by a noted American geographer to present the results and analyze their 2008 survey of migrant settlements in China's capital city. The paper examines the living and work conditions as well as housing consumption behavior of migrants in Chinese cities, focusing on chengzhongcun or urban v...

Over the past thirty years, labor market and land market liberalization in China has transformed the spatial structure of Chinese cities. This study represents the first attempt to empirically investigate the extent to which firms' location choices in a large Chinese city are influenced by the tradeoff between greater external economies from adjace...

The housing market, an important component of the urban economy, is closely integrated with urban development. Urban development attracts labor inflows which then increase the housing demand in the cities. Urban dwellers' willingness-to-pay (WTP) for housing, as part of their living costs, depends on their incomes they can earn in the cities and th...

Over the last 30 years, China's major cities have experienced significant income and population growth. Much of this growth has been fueled by urban production spurred by world demand. Using a unique cross-city panel data set, we test several hypotheses concerning the relationship between home prices, wages, foreign direct investment and ambient ai...

Housing liquidity measures the ability to convert housing to cash as an important characteristic of housing stock. A simple model of buyer offers' distributions was used to theoretically explore the determinants of housing liquidity in a search process. An empirical ordinary least squares model of the time-on-market was developed using data collect...

The submarket theory in urban economics tells that the effect of rail transit on housing price is greater in suburb area than that in central city. In this paper, we use No.13 rail transit line in Beijing to test this theory. The empirical results show that in suburb area, the housing price within 1000m of railway stations are higher by nearly 20%...

The population growth of a city is constrained by its housing supply. The growth occurs if the housing supply is elastic in response to urban demand shocks, if the supply shifts out, or if per-capita housing demand decreases. We use this framework to examine the growth of 85 Chinese cities between 1998 and 2004, focusing on the determinants of the...

The rapid pace of urbanization and income growth in China in the past decade, spurred in part by the liberalization of the urban housing and labor markets, resulted in considerable growth in urban land rents and wage-rates. The objective of this study is to examine the influence of urban quality of living, comprising social and environmental amenit...

In this paper, we study the relationship between housing price and local commuting time in Beijing. Two unique data sets are employed: a large-scale residence survey and the housing transaction database in Beijing Construction Committee. The result of our empirical work supports the prediction of a negative commuting time house price gradient. The...

This paper examines homebuyer's search process and the role of real estate broker in China's urban housing market, where inactive housing resale transactions and an immature brokerage industry are distinct characteristics. Guangzhou is used as a case study to model the intensity and duration of the search process. This study finds that buyers make...

In a monocentric city with a well-functioning residential market, Pareto-efficient spatial equilibrium entails the sorting of residents according to their bid–rent gradient in descending order away from city center. Violation of this sorting condition creates opportunities for Pareto-improving trading of locations and can be sustained only if the m...

Beijing's housing market has boomed over the last fifteen years. The city's population grew by 40.6% and per capita income (in constant RMB) by 273.9% from 1991 to 2005. Using two geocoded data sets, we present new evidence on the real estate price gradient, land price gradient, population densities, and building densities in Beijing's recent free...

As real estate, residential property comprises not only the value of utilization, but also the value of investment, which is somewhat different from that of securities such as stocks and bonds. In this paper, the investment value of newly‐built residences and stocks are compared and analyzed theoretically and empirically. Firstly, the paper summari...

With Granger causality method, this paper examines the causal dynamics among three economic fundamentals: construction investment, other investment and the gross domestic product (GDP). Short-run and long-run interactive effects among these three time series are analyzed from 1981 to 2001. The empirical results show that construction investment has...