Tenure security in land is considered crucial in order to stimulate investment and create economic growth, for three reasons; higher expected returns from investment, better functioning land markets allowing land transfers to more efficient producers, and better access to credit (Demsetz, 1967; Besley, 1995; Brasselle et al., 2002). Land allocation has played a special role in China as a key resource that has been shared based on strong equity principles in rural areas where land has been the main resource pillar of the economy (Carter and Yao, 1998; Jacoby et al., 2002).

Coal has fueled China’s fast growth in the last decades, but it also severely pollutes the air and causes many health issues. The magnitude of the health damage caused by air pollution depends on the location of emission sources. In this paper, we look into the spatial distribution of coal-fired power plants, the major emission sources in China, and investigate the determining factors behind the distribution. We see an overall increase in installed coal-fired power capacity in recent years, with capacity leaps in some provinces.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to attempt to investigate farmer's positional concerns in rural China, and how the positional concerns correlate with household expenditures on visible goods.

Design/methodology/approach: The authors conduct a survey-based experiment to measure farmers' positional concerns, and employ econometric models to examine the determinants of the degree of positional concern and how the positional concern affects household expenditures on visible goods.

Influenza pandemics can severely impact human health and society. Understanding public perception and behavior toward influenza pandemics is important for minimizing the effects of such events. Public perception and behavior are expected to change over the course of an influenza pandemic, but this idea has received little attention in previous studies. Our study aimed to understand the dynamics of public perception and behavior over the course of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic.

The Chinese government has allowed collective village forest land to pass into individualized ownership. The purpose was to alleviate rural poverty and stimulate investment in forests. Using data collected from 288 villages, in eight provinces, over three years, this paper measures the effect of the individualization on one aspect of forest investment, forestation. Because villages voted on the reform, we identify the causal effect of the reform by an instrumental variable estimator based on the countywide decision to offer the reform package.

Using individual travel diary data collected before and after a rail transit expansion in urban Beijing, the impact of urban rail accessibility improvement on the usage of rail transit, automobiles, buses, walking and bicycling, as well as the cross-area externality induced by congestion alleviation, is estimated. The results show that rail transit usage significantly increased for commuters residing in the affected areas and that the additional rail passengers were previously auto users, rather than bus passengers.

How may environmental regulation affect firm location choice? While this question has generated great research interest from high-standard, industrial economies, in this article we turn the spotlight to low-standard, developing countries and use China’s Census of Manufactures data during 2003–2008 to explore how firms with different ownership, during different policy regimes as well as from different industries may respond to environmental regulations in different ways.

This paper evaluates whether the spirit of capitalism can explain the equity premium puzzle. The spirit of capitalism implies that investors acquire wealth not just for consumption, but also to improve their social status. We set up a consumption-based capital asset pricing model incorporating this component. The simulated results from our calibrated model match the mean and the volatility of the equity premium observed in the data.