Residential electricity consumption has an important impact on China’s construction of a low-carbon society. However, at present, little of the literature analyzes the influencing factors of residents’ overall well-being from the perspective of micro investigation. Based on the micro mixed cross section data of the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), this paper empirically studies the impact of residential electricity consumption on residents’ subjective well-being. In addition, in the heterogeneity analysis, we found that an increase in residential electricity consumption will improve the overall well-being of females and people with low levels of education, but it has no significant effect on males and people with high levels of education. Moreover, the increase in residential electricity consumption has improved the life satisfaction of young people and middle-aged people. Meanwhile, the increase in residential electricity consumption has a significant, positive impact on both low-income and high-income households. Further analysis shows that no nonlinear relationship exists between the increase in residents’ power consumption and the improvement in life satisfaction. This paper enriches the research on residential energy and provides policy implications for the current Chinese government to save energy, reduce emissions, and improve residents’ quality of life.

This study utilizes the push–pull framework to examine the impact of homestead and urban homeownership on Chinese migrants’ willingness to settle in urban areas in the long term, as well as the moderating role of local homeownership. The results show that homestead has a significant pushing effect on migrants’ long-term residence, whereas local homeownership has a significant pulling and positive moderating effect. In addition, we conducted multiple robustness tests to confirm the validity of our findings. Moreover, urban homeownership exerts significantly heterogeneous effects on long-term migration across different ages, income levels and regions. Also, migrants who own homesteads and housing are more inclined to relocate to urban areas within the same provinces rather than moving to major cities. Furthermore, we identified the mechanism that local homeownership promotes social integration, which, in turn, strengthens migrants’ long-term residence intentions in urban areas. This study enriches research on China’s land systems and urban migration and aims to shed light on enhancing existing migrant welfare, optimizing housing policies and facilitating urban integration.

We exploit the staggered rollout of the Standard Land Reform across Chinese cities as a quasi-natural experiment to examine its impact on enterprise innovation efficiency. Using a sample of A-share listed companies from 2013 to 2020, we find that the reform significantly increases enterprise-level innovation efficiency by approximately 4.86%. This result remains robust across a series of robustness checks. Mechanism analyses reveal that the reform promotes innovation through reducing transaction costs, increasing fiscal subsidies, and strengthening regional intellectual property protection. Heterogeneity analyses show that the effect is more pronounced for enterprises with higher financing constraints, higher human capital, and greater media attention, as well as in more competitive industries and regions with stronger intellectual property protection. Our findings provide enterprise-level causal evidence that improving land allocation efficiency can foster enterprise innovation, offering policy implications for leveraging institutional reforms in land allocation to promote innovation-driven development.