Shimeng Liu

City attractiveness is an important driving force influencing the flow of human capital and businesses. This paper develops a measure of quality of life (QOL) and quality of business environment (QOB) for prefecture cities in China based on the Rosen-Roback spatial general equilibrium model. We find a positive correlation between QOL and QOB in Chinese cities. Cities with higher attractiveness index rankings are mainly located in the eastern coastal areas and provincial capitals in inland regions. Moreover, workers prefer cities with higher QOB while retired workers relatively favor cities with higher QOL. We also notice that the QOB of cities has a significant positive impact on immigration and business entry decisions. In addition, the correlation between QOL and QOB in the same city has been strengthening over time and the preferences of individuals and businesses for cities remain consistent across different years.

This paper studies the impact of universities on nearby innovation activities by exploiting a unique university expansion policy in China as a quasi-experiment. Utilizing geocoded data on patents and new products at the address level, we obtain three main findings. First, the university expansion significantly increases universities' innovation capacity, which further induces a dramatic boom of local industry patenting activities. Second, the impact of the expansion on nearby industry patents attenuates sharply within 2 kilometers of the universities. Third, the expansion boosts new product introductions by nearby firms and increases instances where nearby industry patents cite university patents. These effects follow similar spatial decay patterns.

In automobile markets where consumers attach social recognition to car ownership, how does the introduction of a lower-cost alternative influence the market outcomes of traditional internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs)? Leveraging high-frequency sales data covering China's entire automobile market from 2018 to 2022, we examine heterogeneous market responses to the emergence of electric vehicles (EVs) across different price segments. Overall, the rise of EVs is associated with lower ICEV sales but higher total automobile sales. More importantly, while EV penetration is negatively correlated with ICEV sales in the lowand mid-end segments, it is positively correlated with ICEV sales in the high-end segment. Further evidence suggests that the rise of EVs amplifies the symbolic value of high-end ICEVs, boosting sales of ICEV models with strong social recognition.

Can pro-growth place-based policies cause social instability? This paper uses a unique hand-collected dataset on legal cases and special economic zones (SEZs) in China to examine the impact of pro-growth place-based policies on local crime in a developing country context. Exploiting the establishment of SEZs as a quasi-natural experiment, we document that SEZs increase the local crime rate by 27.9 per cent. We further show that SEZs significantly impact potential determinants of crime, including labor market conditions, public goods investment, and migration. Leveraging a novel decomposition framework, we emphasize the dominating role of migration in contributing to SEZs’ effect on rising crime. Auxiliary evidence suggests that crime is likely driven by social conflicts faced by migrants. The results highlight previously overlooked unintended social consequences of place-based programs in developing countries.

This paper examines the industry-specific attenuation speed of agglomeration economies and its interplay with the large presence of state-owned enterprises in China. We achieve this focus by taking advantage of unique geo-coded administrative data on the universe of Chinese manufacturing firms. The full-spectrum analysis also allows us to assess the goodness of fit of various spatial decay functional forms and to systematically evaluate the micro-foundations that govern the decay patterns across industry types. We obtain three main findings. First, agglomeration economies attenuate sharply with spatial distance in China, with large heterogeneity in the attenuation speed across ownership and industry types. Second, the spatial decay speed is positively linked with proxies for knowledge spillovers and labor market pooling but negatively linked with proxies for input sharing and the share of the state sector. Last, the inverse square distance decay function presents the best goodness of fit among the tested functional forms.

We use the American Community Survey (ACS) to investigate the extent to which college major decisions were affected during and after the Great Recession with special attention to business and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, as well as the heterogeneity across demographic groups. Several conclusions are reached. First, the Great Recession increased the frequency of STEM majors but decreased the frequency of business majors. Second, the increase for STEM fields spreads across several detailed STEM majors, while the decrease in business majors is especially concentrated among finance and management. Third, we find strong heterogeneous effects of the Great Recession by gender and race/ethnicity. (JEL I20, J24)

We use the American Community Survey (ACS) to investigate the extent to which college major decisions were affected during and after the Great Recession with special attention to business and STEM fields, as well as the heterogeneity by gender, race/ethnicity and combinations of race/ethnicity and gender. Several conclusions are reached. First, we see an overall increase in the frequency of STEM majors but a decrease in the frequency of business majors during and after the Great Recession. Second, the increase for STEM fields is spread across several detailed STEM fields, while the decrease in business majors is especially concentrated among finance and management. Third, we find strong heterogeneous effects by gender and race/ethnicity. Males are pushed away from business majors, while both males and females are pushed toward STEM majors; certain racial groups, such as white and Asian, seem to be affected more than others.

The aim of this paper is to examine the manner and extent to which worker skill type affects agglomeration economies that contribute to productivity in cities. I use college majors to proxy for skill types among workers with a bachelor's degree. Workers with college training in information‐oriented and technical fields (e.g., STEM areas such as engineering, physical sciences, and economics) are associated with economically important within‐field agglomeration economies and also generate sizeable spillovers for workers in other fields. In contrast, within‐field and across‐field spillovers for workers with college training in the arts and humanities are much smaller and often nonexistent. While previous research suggests proximity to college‐educated workers enhances productivity, these findings suggest that not all college‐educated workers are alike. Instead, positive spillover effects appear to derive mostly from proximity to workers with college training in information‐oriented and technical fields.