Owing to China’s rapid urbanization and internal migration, public services are unevenly distributed in cities, affecting urban housing prices. This study examines the dynamic effect of China’s public service levels on urban housing prices. We used the entropy method to calculate the public service index of 30 cities in China and a panel threshold regression model to explore the relationship between urban public service levels and housing prices. We found that the degree of the effect of public service levels on urban housing prices varies with the per capita disposable income of urban residents, demonstrating an inverted U-shaped curve. The role of public services in promoting urban housing prices increases with the increase in the level of urbanization. When the level of urbanization exceeds its threshold, the enhancement effect increases. These results help us better understand the theories of housing price changes in Chinese cities and support policymakers in formulating effective control measures for the housing market.

Environmental problems, including air pollution, have upset the balance between the environment and economic development. In the face of worsening air pollution, growing attention is being paid to the role of financial institutions. To investigate how finance affects air pollution, this study used data from 30 Chinese provinces from 2014–2020, while considering industrial structure optimization and energy structure as threshold variables to propose a panel threshold model, which elucidates a nonlinear relationship between green finance and air quality in China. The panel data are sorted based on urbanization level, resource dependence, and geospatial distribution to examine the heterogeneous effects of green finance on air pollution. The analysis demonstrated that green finance considerably improves the overall air quality in Chinese provinces, but the effect is gradually weakened with the optimization of industrial structure and the improvement of clean energy efficiency. Moreover, green finance exerts a greater inhibitory impact on air pollution through industrial structure optimization compared to the impact of energy structure optimization. Regional variations in the environmental benefits of green finance were discerned. Resource dependence exacerbates the inhibiting impact of green finance on air pollution in the resource-based regions, while urbanization weakens the environmental benefits of green finance in urbanized regions. In terms of geographical distribution, green finance exhibited the best effect on air quality in western China. These findings shed the light on the positive role of green finance on air quality in China, thereby highlighting its importance for the air quality improvement programs of the provincial scales in China.

The impact of urban rail transit on housing prices has attracted the extensive attention of scholars, but few studies have explored the heterogeneous impact of rail transit on housing prices with different price levels. To solve this problem, we adopted the hedonic price model based on ordinary least squares regression as a supplementary method of quantile regression to study the heterogeneous impact of the Chengdu Metro system on low-, middle-, and high-priced housing. The result shows that the housing price rises first, then falls with the distance from the housing to the nearest subway station. Besides, the influence of transportation accessibility on low-, middle-, and high-priced housing decreases progressively. This research can provide a reference for the government’s transportation planning and decision-making.