Beijing has made enormous investment in rail transit since the late 2000s. The rapidly growing subway system greatly improves the accessibility of neighborhoods nearby subway stations and often increases neighborhood population and employment densities, both resulting in a larger market for...

Public transit is viewed as a potential means to mitigate traffic congestion and its resulting air pollution and health consequences. A recent wave of studies has emerged examining whether this public investment can achieve its goals. Employing the difference in difference method, this paper...

The housing affordability issue in mega-cities creates a significant job-housing mismatch and undermines productive new business creation. This paper focuses on Beijing and investigates whether improved accessibility via the subway network helps new firms benefit from agglomeration economies...

Using firm birth records and startup data matched with cities' characteristics, this paper analyzes nearly 300 prefecture-level cities to examine the role of human capital and market access in shaping the economic geography of innovation-driven entrepreneurship in China. We document strong...

Throughout the imperial era, defensive walls surrounded Chinese cities. Although most city walls have vanished, the cities have survived. We analyze a sample of nearly 300 prefectural-level cities in China, among which about half historically had city walls. We document that cities that had...

Using unique data that track college students' performance over multiple high-stakes tests, we study the impact of transitory random disturbances to student cognitive performance and a minimum-passing-score policy on access to graduate education. Exploiting thermal inversions as an instrumental...

Throughout the imperial era, defensive walls surrounded Chinese cities. Although most city walls have vanished, the cities have survived. We analyze a sample of nearly 300 prefectural-level cities in China, among which about half historically had city walls. We document that cities that had...