Haze pollution impacts human health, as well as the competitive capabilities of firms and local economic development. Considerable attention has been given to the study of mechanisms for reducing haze pollution, but few studies have investigated the effect of city-to-city transportation infrastructures on environmental issues based on an institutional perspective. To address this research gap, this study advances our understanding by assessing the effect of city–to–city transportation on haze pollution caused by the operation of high-speed rail, which triggers the rapid flow of individuals and information, improves information transparency, as well as imposes institutional pressure on local governments and firms to reduce haze pollution. To further verify the underlying mechanisms, we tested the development of hard infrastructure (information communication technology) and soft infrastructure (market development level), which represent two conditions for which the mechanism is likely to be critical. We tested our hypotheses using a sample of 288 prefecture-level cities in China during the period from 2005 to 2016. The empirical results indicate that the operation of high-speed rail can reduce haze pollution by 17% on average.

Land use change has become the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after fossil energy combustion. In the context of developing a low-carbon economy, it is important to study how to achieve energy savings and emission reduction by adjusting land prices, and transforming land trading methods and land use types. Utilizing a balanced panel dataset about 291 sample cities in China, during the period of 2010–2016, this paper divided land transactions into three dimensions: land transaction price, land transaction modes, and land transfer structure; then employed a fixed-effect model to investigate the relationship between land transactions and carbon emissions. On top of this, we further analyzed the moderating role of economic development level and emission reduction policy. This study found that land transaction price can significantly inhibit carbon emissions; the amount of land sold by auction and listing has a stronger inhibitory effect on carbon emissions than by bidding; the higher the transfer proportion of industrial land, the higher the carbon emissions, while the transfer proportion of residential land is significantly negatively correlated with carbon emissions; the moderating mechanism shows that the level of economic development and emission reduction policy can play a moderating role in the relationship between land transactions and carbon emissions, but the moderating effect of emission reduction policy is limited, only existing in the relationships between land transaction price, the amount of listed land, and carbon emissions.

With the unique dataset from the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) of the People’s Republic of China, this study aims to provide a patent citation-based analysis of technological innovation in China. This study provides an overall description of Chinese invention patent citations, including citations added by both inventors and examiners. Specifically, our work analyses the inventor citations and examiner citations of both international- and domestic-granted patents in SIPO from four different aspects: citations per patent, foreign citation dependence, highly cited patents and current impact index. Our research results indicate the following: (a) the quantity of citations per patent added by foreign applicants was much larger than that of the Chinese applicants in SIPO, and both decreased year after year. (b) Chinese applicants cited many technological references from seven major foreign countries and drew greatly from external technology and science, but Chinese applicants tended to refer more to domestic technology. (c) The overall impact of Chinese patents became stronger, but invention patents in some developed regions had only relatively weak technological impact. (d) The number of high-quality invention patents surged in every province, but high-quality patents remain mainly distributed in four developed areas. Finally, we propose several suggestions from a policy perspective.