The Effects of Infrastructure Projects on House Prices and Rents:Evidence from the HS2 Extension Cancellation in the UK

This paper uses the HS2 extension cancellation in November 2021 as a quasi-experiment to study its impact on house prices and rents in Leeds.Using a DiD approach on repeat sales and monthly rents,I compare property values near the HS2 station and proposed construction site before and after the announcement.Results show a 3.6%decrease in house prices and a 3.9%decline in rents near the station,while properties near the construction site experienced a 2.4%increase in prices and a 2.1%rise in rents.This is the first paper to analyse the HS2 cancellation effect using panel data methods.

Fiscal Pressure,Land Finance and Ratchet Effects of House Prices

In this paper,we focus on the issues of local governments’fiscal pressure,land finance and house prices,and systematically analyze how local governments’fiscal pressure and land finance lead to China’s ratcheting up of house prices.The results show that to release the fiscal pressure,local governments tend to increase land revenue and obtain high real estate related revenue by raising house prices.In this sense,the increase of the land transfer price will result in the increase of the cost of real estates,and eventually leading to the increase of house prices.That is to say,local governments’fiscal pressure will not only result in the increase of house prices directly but also consolidate the ratchet effects of house prices.

Does supplier concentration matter to investors during the COV1D-19 crisis:evidence from China?

The literature shows that investor attention to customer–supplier disclosure increases when suppliers’information arrival is anticipated.Due to the widespread of city lockdowns in China and the implementation of social distancing to control the COVID-19 pandemic,investor attention to potential disruption of the supply chain spikes,leading to a price devaluation for firms with high supplier concentration risk.We find that a higher degree of supplier concentration is related to more serious stock price declines over the short-term and medium-term windows right after the Wuhan lockdown.This result lends support to the argument that the concentration risk of suppliers is a significant consideration for China stock market investors,especially under the potential financial distress at the firm level induced by the COVID-19 crisis.

What Drives China’s Transformational Growth:Technology,Efficiency or Factor Cost?

With rising costs of capital, labor and energy, cost efficiency and cost management have become important questions confronting the next stage of China＇s economic growth. By building a parametric cost frontier model using panel data, this paper investigates the drivers of economic growth transformation from a cost perspective. According to our research, among various effects triggering corporate cost variations and in addition to the expansion of production scale, the largest effect is from technological progress, followed by the effect of factor price adjustment and the effect of efficiency gains. Within the decomposition of factor price adjustment effect, the energy factor effect is the most significant. Furthermore, energy price fluctuations are likely to become major factors restricting saving-based growth. Further study reveals that both the ownership reform and opening up of SOEs are favorable to reducing the costs generated by inefficiency. This paper provides empirical evidence for the driving mechanism of saving-based growth transformation as well as empirical evidence to support to the further deepening of property rights and market-oriented reforms.

Dynamic Pricing with Stochastic Reference Price Effect

We study a dynamic pricing problem of a firm facing stochastic reference price effect.Randomness is incorporated in the formation of reference prices to capture either consumers’heterogeneity or exogenous factors that affect consumers’memory processes.We apply the stochastic optimal control theory to the problem and derive an explicit expression for the optimal pricing strategy.The explicit expression allows us to obtain the distribution of the steady-state reference price.We compare the expected steadystate reference price to the steady-state reference price in a model with deterministic reference price effect,and we find that the former one is always higher.Our numerical study shows that the two steady-state reference prices can have opposite sensitivity to the problem parameters and the relative difference between the two can be very significant.

Direct energy rebound effect for road transportation in China

The enhancement of energy efficiency stands as the principal avenue for attaining energy conservation and emissions reduction objectives within the realm of road transportation.Nevertheless,it is imperative to acknowledge that these objectives may,in part or in entirety,be offset by the phenomenon known as the energy rebound effect(ERE).To quantify the long-term EREs and short-term EREs specific to China’s road transportation,this study employed panel cointegration and panel error correction models,accounting for asymmetric price effects.The findings reveal the following:The long-term EREs observed in road passenger transportation and road freight transportation range from 13%to 25%and 14%to 48%,respectively;in contrast,the short-term EREs in road passenger transportation and road freight transportation span from 36%to 41%and 3.9%to 32%,respectively.It is noteworthy that the EREs associated with road passenger transportation and road freight transportation represent a partial rebound effect,falling short of reaching the magnitude of a counterproductive backfire effect.This leads to the inference that the upsurge in energy consumption within the road transportation sector cannot be solely attributed to advancements in energy efficiency.Instead,various factors,including income levels,the scale of commodity trade,and industrial structure,exert more substantial facilitating influences.Furthermore,the escalation of fuel prices fails to dampen the demand for energy services,whether in the domain of road passenger transportation or road freight transportation.In light of these conclusions,recommendations are proffered for the formulation of energy efficiency policies pertinent to road transportation.