(Correspondent: Wang Tianjian) Recently, the paper “Car Restriction Policies and Housing Markets”, completed entirely by Assistant Professor Lyu Xueying, was published in Journal of Development Economics, Volume 156, 2022. This paper investigates the differential impacts of a unique car restriction policy – the car purchase lottery in Beijing – on the housing markets across locations within the city. The author uses a difference-in-differences approach to compare heterogeneous neighborhoods before and after the implementation of the policy. Housing prices experience a relative increase at locations closer to common destinations (employment centers: 0.7% per kilometer; primary schools: 3.3% per kilometer) and with better access to public transit (subways: 1.2% per kilometer; buses: 0.08% per line). These changes reflect capitalization of the car restriction policy and imply a large wealth redistribution as large as 6 years of average disposable income across homeowners. The results are relevant to policy, both in the context of unintended consequences and for efforts to develop offsetting measures.

Assistant Professor Lyu Xueying had another paper “Transmission Constraints, Intermittent Renewables and Welfare”, co-authored by Jacob LaRiviere, published in Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Volume 112, 2022. Jacob LaRiviere is a senior researcher of Microsoft and a part-time professor in University of Washington and University of Tennessee. The authors use the roll-out of a large transmission expansion in Texas’ electricity market to measure the market impacts of the transmission expansion on benefits of increased renewable capacity. The value of transmission expansion varies based upon how new renewable investment over the sample is attributed to transmission expansion: payback periods range from roughly 40 years (assuming no investment impact) to roughly 20 years (assuming observed capacity increases are due to transmission expansion). Payback periods also depend on how global pollutants like carbon and regional pollutants like PM 2.5 are internalized by regional policy makers, reducing the payback period further to as little as 11 years.

Assistant Professor Lyu Xueying graduated from University of California San Diego and obtained her Ph.d in Economics in 2019. In the same year, she entered her job in School of Economics of Nankai University.

Journal of Development Economics and Journal of Environmental Economics and Management are both widely recognized as international authoritative journals in their respective fields. Both the two journals are identified as level-A foreign language academic journal by the school’s discipline of economics.

Link of the JDE paper:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387822000268

Link of the JEEM paper:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095069622000092