Most existing studies empirically investigated the impact of rail transit on housing prices using the traditional hedonic price model, which is based on ordinary least squares (OLS). This method can estimate only the average implicit prices of housing characteristics and may ignore possible heterogeneous impacts of rail transit at different housing price levels. As a useful supplement to OLS regression, quantile regression can measure how implicit prices of explanatory variables vary across different price levels, thereby providing a comprehensive picture of the relationship between housing characteristics and prices. By using Hangzhou, China as an example, this study adopts the traditional hedonic price model and quantile regression model to investigate the capitalization effect of a new subway line on housing prices. Empirical results suggest the significant impacts of accessibility to subway stations. The average housing price within 2 km of the station is 2.1% to 6.1% higher than those outside. We also find that the impacts of the subway differ significantly across the distribution of housing prices, wherein the absolute value of estimated coefficients increased from 0.023 for the 15th quantile to 0.086 for the 95th quantile. The subway opening strengthens the capitalization effect of traffic accessibility. The absolute value of price elasticity increases from 0.044 to 0.053, and the range of influence is expanded from 1500 m to 2000 m.

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted the urban real estate market around the world. This study regards the impact of the pandemic as a quasi-natural experiment, using the Difference in Difference model (DID) to examine the short-term impact of this severe public health crisis on the residential land and housing markets in the Yangtze River Delta. The study found that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant inhibitory effect on the average price of urban residential land and houses in the Yangtze River Delta. Although the currency oversupply has caused real estate prices in all cities to rise, the price of urban residential land decreased by 13.7% for each additional unit of epidemic severity. The greater the city’s resilience to the pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic, the faster its residential land prices will recover. Empirical research on the new house samples confirmed this conclusion. Local governments should continue to improve their ability to manage abnormal conditions, not only to prevent the spread of the epidemic, but also to gradually promote the recovery of the urban economy, strengthen urban resilience to better respond to health crises, and achieve sustainable urban development.

Rural settlement containment is a challenging issue for many countries. It becomes especially daunting when people want rural settlements to serve multiple social goals. For example, in China, the central government seeks to simultaneously achieve three goals with the rural homestead management system. It wishes to: (1) contain rural settlements to preserve farmland; (2) entitle rural households to free homestead; and (3) encourage rural residents to accrue monetary income from homesteads. This paper, using survey data from 54 villages in China, shows that these three policy goals are an impossible combination. In fact, the latter two encourage settlement expansion. Moreover, with the latter two in place, we find that rural cadres expand homesteads more aggressively than others, exacerbating social and economic inequality within rural communities.

This paper studies how political cycles change the mix of industrial and residential land in urban land leasing. The mixture of different types of land leasing in cities affects urban landscape, resident welfare, and economic sustainability. Using prefecture-level panel data from China and statistical regressions, this paper finds that cities lease out 3% more industrial land, as a percentage of total annual urban land leasing, when their party committee secretaries have been in office for no more than two years. In the same period, they lease out 2% less residential land. This is explained by the strategic behaviors of party committee secretaries to increase their chances of political promotion. Urban land leasing fuels local economic performance and increases the chance of city leaders’ promotion. While the economic benefits of residential land are immediate, those of industrial land cannot be reaped until two years later. This divided timeline results in more aggressive leasing of industrial land early on in party committee secretaries’ service terms, and that of residential land later on. Mayors’ service terms do not have the same effect. This political cycle distorts the temporal and spatial distributions of industrial and residential land in cities, and results in inefficient land use and unstable real estate markets.