Yehua Dennis Wei

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at University of Utah

Subjective well-being (SWB) has recently gained significant attention as an important indicator of measuring quality of life. Based on the Twitter Sentiment Geographical Index, this study analyzes the spatial distribution characteristic of county-level SWB across the United States. We apply multiple linear regression, structural equation modeling (...

Health inequity represents a significant social injustice with major policy implications. This study examines the role of neighborhood intergenerational mobility (IM)—defined as the extent to which children within a specific neighborhood can achieve better socioeconomic outcomes than their parents—in shaping population health, addressing widening hea...

Health inequity represents a significant social injustice with major policy implications. This study examines the role of neighborhood intergenerational mobility (IM)—defined as the extent to which children within a specific neighborhood can achieve better socioeconomic outcomes than their parents—in shaping population health, addressing widening hea...

Studies of parks underscore the significance of park equity, considering both its quantity and quality. However, the vulnerability of peri-urban communities, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic concerning park utilization, goes beyond what objective assessments of access and quality can capture. Based on a multidimensional and comparative frame...

This study explores the mediating role of intergenerational mobility (IM) in the relationship between economic inequality and population health in the United States, focusing on life expectancy. Using multilevel structural equation modeling across state and commuting zone (CZ) levels for both genders, we find that economic inequality indices, excep...

Despite extensive literature having reported on contextual place effects on older adults’ individual health and well-being outcomes, the longitudinal relationships between multidimensional neighborhood environments and diverse psychosocial outcomes remain less known. This study addresses two questions: 1) What are the prospective associations betwe...

Although researchers have consistently linked structural neighborhood disadvantage with poorer mental health, they continue to search for underlying mechanisms. In this paper, we test whether the association between structural neighborhood disadvantage and psychological distress is mediated by perceived neighborhood disorder and divine struggles. U...

Characteristics of sprawl, like decreased social cohesion and lower accessibility to jobs and services, could negatively affect economic opportunity and intergenerational mobility. City-level studies have found mixed results, but neighborhood effects have been largely ignored. This study uses census tract and city-level data in a multilevel model t...

Intergenerational mobility (IM) has recently generated significant attention. However, the mechanisms of IM, including the neighborhood effects, are still not well understood. This research aims to advance the research on IM by emphasizing the role of neighborhood environments and their mediating effects in the United States. Our results suggest th...

Mental health disorders have become a global problem, garnering considerable attention. However, the root causes of deteriorating mental health remain poorly understood, with existing literature predominantly concentrating on socioeconomic conditions and psychological factors. This study uses multi‐linear and geographically weighted regressions (GW...

Producer services are a critical indicator of global cities in advanced economies, whose spatial-temporal dynamics reflect the trajectory of urban transformation. However, the growth of producer services in China cannot be fully explained by current theories (e.g. neoclassical, institutional, global city and human capital theories), especially rega...

Persistent racial inequality in socioeconomic status within urban areas has been a significant concern in both the US and European countries. Differences across racial groups in intergenerational mobility (IM) have been identified as a key source of this persistence. However, efforts to understand racial inequality in IM have rarely considered the...

The skyrocketing housing prices in Chinese metropolises have generated broad concerns. Recent studies have moved beyond hedonic approaches considering housing attributes, location, and neighborhood by introducing urban structure and amenities as factors in housing prices. However, the role of amenities is often simplified, and the influence of urba...

Housing prices have skyrocketed in China’s major cities, resulting in a lack of housing affordability and intensifying urban inequality. Taking college graduates, migrant workers, and low-income families as the representatives of vulnerable populations in urban housing, this paper analyzes their preferences and barriers toward affordable housing pr...

This study examines the mechanisms of spatial variation in intergenerational mobility (IM) in United States (US) counties. We explicitly emphasized the effects of urban space and four aspects of urban sprawl-density, mix of uses, centering, and accessibility-and their interaction with socioeconomic factors. We found that urban sprawl variables did...

Inequality in access to urban green infrastructures has been a major concern among scholars and governments, especially since the COVID-19 outbreak. There is a lack of knowledge on how people respond to the pandemic regarding the usage of green infrastructure in cities. This paper explores the shifts in visitation to parks and trails, two popular g...

This paper examined the multi-scalar effects of different types of agglomeration economies, namely, specialization, related variety, unrelated variety, and urbanization economies, on tech firm births in Salt Lake County, Utah, U.S. We found that these agglomeration economies affected tech firm births simultaneously, but their spatial externalities...

Analyzing how the underlying mechanism influences land value changes is essential to understanding the land market, which contributes to sustainable urbanization. Drawing upon a land transaction dataset, we analyze the determinants of urban land prices from 2008 to 2020, considering land supply and demands, with particular attention to natural rest...

This article explores the regional disparities in water supply coverage in Pakistan in the context of intraregional development patterns. We applied the Gini index, Esteban and Ray index, and Moran’s I to measure regional development patterns in terms of inequality, polarization, and spatial concentration and build an integrated framework combining...

Studies investigating innovation networks shaped by large innovative enterprises (LI-ENTs), which play a very important role in intercity diffusion of technology and knowledge, are rather thin on the ground. Using location information of LI-ENTs in China, we performed a headquarter-branch analysis to generate intercity innovation linkages and analy...

Active travel is promoted in transit-oriented development to reduce the negative outcomes of urban sprawl, such as traffic congestion and obesity. This article examines the impacts of the built environment on walking and biking trip generation around transit stations through a study of SLCo, Utah. A regression tree method is employed. The results s...

This paper examines the drivers of distribution of pollution-intensive enterprises (PIEs) at the intraurban level that are less studied. Employing the complete spatial database of PIEs obtained from the National Economic Census of 2004, 2008, and 2013, the paper analyses the spatial restructuring of PIEs within Foshan, China, a typical manufacturin...

This paper investigates spatiotemporal dynamics of the effects of urban form on the Covid-19 spread within local communities in Salt Lake County, Utah, in the United States. We identify three types of communities—minority, traditional urban and suburban, and new suburban—and three stages throughout March 2020—September 2021, reflecting the initial,...

Residential land price is a critical component of housing prices and affordability, and existing studies of its influencing factors emphasize location and accessibility. This study analyzes the effects of neighborhood land use, especially employment and services, on residential land prices in Nanjing, a subcenter in the Yangtze River Delta region,...

This paper examines population redistribution and urban growth in Nanjing-an ancient capital and a new Tier-1 city in China from 1990 to 2015, focusing on the dynamic processes of urbanization and suburbanization. We rely on China's census and survey microdata and the shift-share method to investigate population changes and spatial expansion in the...

This paper examines the effects of the new economy on national city size distribution in 102 countries. Results show that the new economy has significant effects on city size distributions and such effects are heterogeneous across countries. Human capital contributes to the polarization of city size distribution in developed countries and service-d...

While urbanization promotes both economic development and job opportunities, it also exerts enormous pressures on the urban land resource. Increasing urban land use efficiency (ULUE) is important towards achieving the sustainable development of China. This paper theoretically analyzes the impact of industrial agglomeration on ULUE and its spillover...

COVID-19 has swept the world, and the unprecedented decline in transit ridership has been noticed. However, little attention has been paid to the resilience of the transportation system, particularly in medium-sized cities. Drawing upon a light rail ridership dataset in Salt Lake County from 2017 to 2021, we develop a novel method to measure the vu...

This study examines spatial shifts across Chinese cities between 2002 and 2018 in corporate control due to mergers and acquisitions (M&As), which are important for the Chinese urban system based on the command-and-control criteria. Descriptive results indicate that the spatial reallocation of corporate control in China has been largely dominated by...

The patent transfer provides an important indication of technology flows and knowledge diffusion across space. Drawing on patent transfer data, we modeled intercity technology transfer networks in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macau Greater Bay Area, a city region special for its “one country, two systems” structure, in the periods 2007–2011 and 2012–201...

10558 Background: Obesity, physical inactivity, excessive alcohol consumption, and poor diet are all modifiable risk factors for cancer. These unhealthy behaviors are disproportionally concentrated in racial and ethnic minorities and these disparities may have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study examined racial and ethnic disp...

Environmental regulation (ER) and local protectionism (LP) are important policy tools for Chinese local governments to improve the environment and promote growth, respectively, but we know little about their interplay in dealing with pollution-intensive industries and enterprises. Using spatial correlation analysis and spatial panel simultaneous eq...

The increasing globalization has led to significant transformations in the world's economic and political landscapes, with most countries and regions undergoing socioeconomic transitions and spatial reconfigurations. In this context, polycentric patterns have become prominent representations of urban landscapes, and scientific cognition of the urba...

The city region has emerged as an important form of regional development and governance. However, the dynamics of spatial inequality in city regions are misunderstood. This study examines the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) to determine the spatiotemporal evolution of regional inequality across prefecture-level municipalities from 1990 to 2018. It finds...

Studies of creativity in urban China are heavily confined at the interurban level and have been criticized for unclear spatial mechanisms and missing local context. This study constructs a theoretical framework to understand the role of urban amenity on the local attractiveness to producer services and further analyzes such attractiveness in Shangh...

With the rapid urbanization and industrialization, the uneven distribution of polluting enterprises among different socioeconomic groups has become a prominent environmental social problem in transitional China but is rarely recognized. This paper introduces environmental justice theories in industrial location studies. A heuristic analytical frame...

This study explores the spatial inequality of job accessibility in urban China, focusing on geographical skills mismatch in Shanghai. Our results suggest that geographical skills mismatch should be a critical concern in measuring job accessibility because the urban villages create residential sites for low-skill workers in central Shanghai. Based o...

The rapid development of high-speed rail (HSR) has accelerated urbanization of the Yangtze River Delta (YRD). However, the impacts of HSR opening, opening time of HSR, and heterogeneity effects of HSR stations’ characteristics on urban land use have not been well studied. Based on the land-use remote sensing data of YRD for 1990–2015, this study an...

Polycentric development is being promoted to lessen problems of urban sprawl and reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT). This study examines polycentric development in the Wasatch Front Region (WFR), Utah, from a morphological perspective using employment data and a functional perspective by analyzing trip chain behavior. We find that morphologically,...

In contrast to abundant research on population (re)distribution in China, the dynamics of intra‐urban employment concentration remain poorly understood. Drawing upon firm‐level employment data for 2008 and 2013 at a fine analytic scale, we utilize a two‐stage approach involving nonparametric estimating and proximity‐based threshold setting, persist...

With rising environmental regulations and trade disputes, Chinese industries are facing tremendous pressures to restructure and relocate, and pollution‐intensive industries (PIIs) are undergoing particularly significant location adjustment. Scholars have proposed various location theories and econometric models to explain the investment location dy...

The prevalence of obesity has become a primary risk factor for adolescents’ health, which is an essential factor in poverty reduction and sustainable development. Physical activity can help adolescents reduce obesity risk and keep a healthy body mass index (BMI). We analyze the 2010 National Youth Physical Activity and Nutrition Survey (NYPANS) for...

Current quantitative measures of job accessibility rarely consider the interaction between job opportunities and labor force, and the effects of dynamic travel mode choice. Drawing upon multiple open-source datasets, we develop a job accessibility index by extending the two-step floating catchment area method (2SFCA). The job accessibility indices...

Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) poses an increasing threat to public health, as incidence rates continue to rise globally. However, the etiology of T1D is still poorly understood, especially from the perspective of geography. The objective of this research is to examine the incidence of T1D among youth and to identify high-risk clusters and their association...

The high-speed rail (HSR) network in China has expanded rapidly, significantly reducing transportation costs and improving accessibility. However, scholars are concerned about whether HSRs further centralize resources and intensify regional polarization. This paper studies the role of HSR in the process of urban development and regional integration...

Shanghai has experienced a rapid process of urbanization and urban expansion, which increases travel costs and limits job accessibility for the economically disadvantaged population. This paper investigates the jobs-housing imbalance problem in Shanghai at the subdistrict-level (census-level) and reaches the following conclusions. First, the jobs-h...

Chinese people are increasingly using social media to express their concerns regarding pollution, especially when confronted with thick haze. This study aims to explore the effects of public pressure reflected by social media on urban PM2.5 levels and the mechanism underlying the relationship. The results of spatial regression models confirm the po...

This study analyzes how political factors, cultural and geographical distance, and agglomeration affect the distribution of Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) through a study of information and communication technologies (ICT) firms using nested logit models. The results show that ownership, Chinese ethnic networks, and sectoral agglo...

Rapid urbanization intensifies land-use transition by shrinking cropland and increasing the land development of land in China, which affects the ecosystem services value (ESV) and causes environmental degradation. To improve the quality of the ecological environment, China has launched a strategy for the construction of an ecological civilization a...

This study explores spatial patterns and mechanisms of industrial growth in Salt Lake County, Utah, which vary with sectoral divisions and scales in the context of urban sprawl. We find that besides the center growth, producer services prefer newly developed areas, and manufacturing has a suburbanizing growth pattern. The spatial regressions indica...

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are the main force of spatial restructuring in the location of economic decision making. This paper analyzes the changing geography of M&As and its influencing factors in China during the period of 2002–2016. It shows a significant “core‐periphery” spatial pattern or network structure, in which a core group of major...

In the last decade or so, inequality studies have assumed renewed prominence across the social sciences. In this introduction to a special issue of Applied Geography, we set out to articulate the importance of urban spatial context in broader present-day inequality debates. We argue that the information-based economy is emphatically urban-based and...

As an obstacle to the hedonic model’s reliability, housing submarkets have drawn plenty of scholarly attention because they lack an integrated and standardized classification framework and validation methods. By incorporating multiple spatial statistics and data mining techniques into a hybrid spatial data mining method, this study develops an inno...

The financial crisis has dramatically reshaped the map of inequality; in particular, wealth has been redistributed because of fluctuations in the prices of equities and housing. However, since the explanation of this issue has by default been seen as economists' responsibility, the spatial dimension of the financial crisis still remains unexplored,...

The city-region has emerged as an important scale of state spatial strategy in China to promote equitable and sustainable development. This study investigates the spatial inequality of city-regions in the Yangtze River Valley (YRV) in terms of population, land, GDP and productivity, and examines changing patterns and factors of GDP per capita. We f...

Housing values are heavily influenced by urban facilities. However, the amenity effects of urban facilities have not been fully assessed, and their spatial heterogeneity has largely been neglected. Taking Nanjing as an example, this study adopts a synthetic approach that considers scarcity, accessibility, and submarkets, and highlights the influenc...

Innovation policies have become an important element in national and regional innovation systems. This study presents a framework to analyze innovation policies and outputs, in terms both of knowledge and economic benefits, in China, with a focus on Jiangsu. We classify local innovation policies into seven major categories and twenty-one subcategor...

Walking increases physical activity and reduces obesity. Walking behavior is influenced by many different factors, including urban safety. This article studies origin and destination choices of walking behavior in Salt Lake City using GIS and statistical analyzes.We find that the origins, and destinations are influenced by different neighborhood en...

Urbanization and regional development in transitional China are land-centered, and urban land expansion has received substantial attention from researchers. However, the nature and dynamics of the urban land market remain understudied. Using a multi-scale framework of variables at both the land-parcel and city levels and a unique database of parcel...

Rural-urban and interregional migration has greased the wheels of China's labor market and fueled rapid urbanization. The spatial distribution of migrants has changed significantly in recent years. We create a panel of Chinese cities using decennial census and annual yearbook data, studying the distribution of migrants from 2010 to 2016, comparing...

This paper investigates the relationship between agglomeration and water pollution, and the effect of environment policies on water pollution reduction. The study employs a quasi-natural experimental method by coupling river water monitoring sites and development zones (DZs). We found that DZs were associated with water quality deterioration in the...

This paper studies the relationships between network capabilities and innovation development in the context of two types of innovation networks: scientific knowledge networks (SKN) and technological knowledge networks (TKN). Focusing on two types of network capabilities, namely acquisition capability and control capability, the paper uses spatial r...

This study investigated how urban cultural and economic tolerance affects urban innovative capacities based on China's prefecture‐level cities. Several tolerance indices, including ratios of migrants, rental housing, gay people, and private economies were introduced and the cities’ tolerance scores were measured using factor analysis. The results s...

Inequality has been the subject of intense debates in China, but inequality across cities remains less studied. This article investigates economic inequality based on prefectural-level cities during the period from 1990 to 2010. Statistical analyses indicate that interregional inequality among cities has increased, which is mostly attributable to w...

Most existing studies on environmental regulations and the location dynamics of pollution-intensive industries regard new environmental procedures as an incremental development process, and neglect the influence of sudden changes in environmental regulations triggered by a pollution crisis. Using the drinking water crisis in the Taihu Lake Watershe...

Climate change threatens many developing countries with more frequent and intense extreme weather events. Researchers, however, have not comprehensively examined how extreme weather influences urbanization and sustainable development. Based on the spatial estimates of precipitation, tropical cyclones, and temperature for the period of 2000 to 2010,...

Using prefecture-level panel data and social media data, this study investigates how industrial agglomeration, environmental regulations, and technology affect the pollutant intensity and spillover channels of pollutant emissions by integrating social and economic networks into a Spatial Durbin Model. The results show that industrial agglomeration,...

Skyrocketing housing prices in China's megacities have generated broad concerns. By integrating open data from Lianjia.com, Dianping.com, Mobike.com, and Baidu Map POI, we analyze spatial patterns of apartment prices and their association with local attributes in Shanghai. We find that Shanghai's residential market still has a monocentric structure...

This paper analyzes regional inequality in Western China through a case study of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region from 1989 to 2012. We have found a recent trend of increasing county-level inequality, in which the distribution of regional inequality has changed from a single peak to a bimodal pattern. Based on the multi-mechanism framework, we have...

Industrial restructuring is widely considered an important force in regional economic growth and sustainable development. With increased globalization and economic transition, a dramatic industrial restructuring has been taking place in China. Applying geographically weighted shift-share model (GW-SSM) and geographically and temporally weighted reg...

Understanding the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the housing market is critical for formulating land/housing policies and achieving sustainable urbanization. This study analyzes the housing transactions at the city, community, and apartment levels in Nanjing, focusing on the effects of government policy and amenity. We find that housing prices hav...