Publications

Big houses on a small island: legislating Singapore’s ‘good class’ bungalows

Edward TI

Land reform in post-independent Singapore was led by compulsory purchase predominantly in the 1960s–70s and resulted in numerous kampungs or villages being demolished. With efficient assembly of land, high-rise public flats were built to accommodate the country’s burgeoning population. Today, 95 per cent of residents reside in high-rise dwellings and Singapore is the 3rd most densely populated country globally. Remarkably, planning regulations protect a housing typology known as ‘good class bungalows’ (GCBs). Though housing less than 0.2 per cent of Singapore households, GCBs collectively take up 7 per cent of the available land for housing. Numbering less than three thousand, GCBs have statutorily required large minimum lot sizes and are situated in Singapore’s choiciest residential enclaves. Development of GCB land to more intensive use is strictly prohibited. In this article, I examine the legal policies and socioeconomic rationale for maintaining this uniquely Singaporean institution, concluding that there are indeed cogent justifications for its existence.

TI, Seng Wei, Edward. Big houses on a small island: legislating Singapore’s ‘good class’ bungalows. (2022). International Journal of Housing Policy. 1-17.

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Attenuation of agglomeration economies: Evidence from the universe of Chinese manufacturing firms

Li JING, Liyao LI, and Shimeng LIU

This paper quantifies industry-specific spatial attenuation of agglomeration economies by taking advantage of unique geocoded administrative data on the universe of Chinese manufacturing firms. The estimates of industry-level attenuation speed further allow us to systematically assess the goodness of fit of various spatial decay functional forms and to evaluate the micro-foundations that govern the decay patterns across industries. We obtain three main findings. First, agglomeration spillovers attenuate by about 90 percent on average from 0–1 km to 1–5 km in China, with large heterogeneity in the extent of attenuation ranging from 73 percent to 116 percent across industries. Second, the spatial decay speed is positively linked with proxies for knowledge spillovers and labor market pooling but is 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.

JING, Li; LI, Liyao; and LIU, Shimeng. Attenuation of agglomeration economies: Evidence from the universe of Chinese manufacturing firms. (2022). Journal of Urban Economics. 130, 1-18.

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Comparative Lessons in Sectional Title Laws: Mitigating Urban Inequality in South Africa

Edward TI

Urban inequality in South Africa is a formidable problem that is linked to the injustices of its historical apartheid past. This paper identifies sectional titles, a form of property ownership where proprietors wholly own their apartment unit while co-owning the land and common property, as critical to providing more affordable housing. Sectional title schemes mitigate urban inequality by giving a greater proportion of the country the opportunity to own legally secure, well-located dwellings while serving as a platform where communal living could take place. Two suggestions how sectional title legislation can further alleviate aspects of urban inequality are made (1) Permitting a supermajority of sectional owners to terminate a sectional scheme prevents holdout and allows urban land to be redeveloped, providing an increase in housing. (2) Municipalities could consider mandating ethnic integration in sectional schemes to counter the organic formation of mono-racial residential enclaves which remain in present-day South Africa.

TI, Edward S. W.. Comparative lessons in sectional title laws: Mitigating urban inequality in South Africa. (2022). Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. 42, (4), 1012-1039.

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Housing wealth shocks, home equity withdrawal, and the claiming of Social Security retirement benefits

Naqun HUANG, Li JING, and Amanda ROSS

This paper examines the impact of changes in house prices on when eligible individuals start receiving Social Security benefits. If house prices increase, financially constrained households may draw upon the additional home equity to finance expenses and delay receipt of Social Security in order to have increased lifetime monthly benefits. To address concerns that house price changes are correlated with unobserved local demand shocks, we use a control function approach and employ two different instrumental variables. We find that individuals delay Social Security claiming when house prices increase during the housing boom. The probability of claiming within two years after becoming eligible decreases by 8.67-8.81 percent for every 10 percent increase in house prices. We also find that the total home loan amount increases in response to the price appreciation, indicating households are drawing upon their home equity to finance consumption and delay receiving Social Security.

HUANG, Naqun; JING, Li; and ROSS, Amanda. Housing wealth shocks, home equity withdrawal, and the claiming of social security retirement benefits. (2022). Economic Inquiry. 60, (2), 620-644.

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Forced moves and home maintenance: The amplifying effects of mortgage payment burden on underwater homeowners

John HARDING, Li JING, Stuart ROSENTHAL, and Xirui ZHANG

Although the adverse effect of high loan to value ratios (LTV) on mortgage default is known, the potential amplifying effect of high payment-to-income (PTI) ratios that can force families out of their homes has received limited attention. High PTI and LTV can also add to default costs by discouraging home maintenance. Using the 1985-2013 AHS panel, we show that high PTI prompts families to move and especially so for households with LTV above 120%. This lends support for policies like HAMP and HARP that seek to reduce forced moves and mortgage default by lowering mortgage payment burden for financially stressed families. High PTI also reduces home maintenance but in this case amplification effects differ: it is low PTI that amplifies adverse effects of high LTV as underwater families divert discretionary spending away from maintenance.

HARDING, John; JING, Li; ROSENTHAL, Stuart; and ZHANG, Xirui. Forced moves and home maintenance: The amplifying effects of mortgage payment burden on underwater homeowners. (2022). Real Estate Economics. 50, (2), 498-533.

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JUE insight: Migration, transportation infrastructure, and the spatial transmission of COVID-19 in China

Bingjing LI and Lin MA

This paper evaluates the impacts of migration flows and transportation infrastructure on the spatial transmission of COVID-19 in China. Prefectures with larger bilateral migration flows and shorter travel distances with Hubei, the epicenter of the outbreak, experienced a wider spread of COVID-19. In addition, richer prefectures with higher incomes were better able to contain the virus at the early stages of community transmission. Using a spatial general equilibrium model, we show that around 28% of the infections outside Hubei province can be explained by the rapid development in transportation infrastructure and the liberalization of migration restrictions in the recent decade.

LI, Bingjing and MA, Lin. JUE insight: Migration, transportation infrastructure, and the spatial transmission of COVID-19 in China. (2022). Journal of Urban Economics. 127, 1-8.

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Subway, collaborative matching, and innovation

Yumi KOH, Li JING, and Jianhuan XU

Expansion of subway networks helps to enhance connectivity and matches of people by facilitating their mobility. Using rapid expansion of the Beijing subway from 2000 to 2018, we analyze its impact on collaborative matches in innovations. We find that an hour reduction in travel time between a pair of locations in Beijing brought a 15% to 38% increase in collaborated patents. Far-apart location pairs were more affected, and the local average treatment effect is approximately 35% to 82%. Such effect is mainly driven by increased matches among highly productive inventors due to complementarity between inventors’ productivity and travel time. At the same time, we find that the entry of new inventors, relocation of existing inventors, and low productive inventors also contribute to the increase in collaborative matches, especially in the long run

Yumi Koh, Jing Li, Jianhuan Xu; Subway, Collaborative Matching, and Innovation. The Review of Economics and Statistics 2022; doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01279

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Urbanization policy and economic development: A quantitative analysis of China's differential hukou reforms

Wen-tai HSU and Lin MA

The household registration system (hukou system) in China has hampered rural-urban migration by posing large migration friction. The system has been gradually relaxed in the past few decades, but the reforms have been differential in city size. We find a striking contrast in migration patterns between years 2005 and 2015; rural people tended to move more to large cities in 2005, but more to small- and medium-sized cities in 2015. We calibrate a spatial quantitative model to the world economy in both years with China divided into rural, mega-city, and other-city regions. We find that alternative urbanization policies that are not differential and that are more laissez-faire substantially improve national welfare, in magnitudes that are comparable to the welfare gains from the trade liberalization that China has put in place in the past.

Wen-Tai Hsu, Lin Ma, Urbanization policy and economic development: A quantitative analysis of China's differential hukou reforms, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Volume 91, 2021, 103639, ISSN 0166-0462, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2020.10

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Hedonic Price of Housing Space

Sumit AGARWAL, Yanying CHEN, Li JING, and Yi Jin TAN

This article estimates hedonic prices for different levels of housing space, by exploiting a unique space‐adding project in Singapore that added a uniform amount of space to each existing housing unit regardless of the original size. This space adding program was carried out if sufficient residents vote in favor of space adding. Using a difference‐in‐differences (DiD) strategy after restricting our sample to narrow margins around the voting cutoff, we find that the additional space increased the resale price of a housing unit by 7% on average, and the extent of price appreciation varied significantly across the original size of the units.

AGARWAL, Sumit; CHEN, Yanying; JING, Li; and TAN, Yi Jin. Hedonic price of housing space. (2021). Real Estate Economics. 49, (2), 574-609.

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Government Management Capacities and the Containment of COVID-19: A Repeated Cross-Sectional Study across Chinese Cities

Wenchao LI, Jing LI, and Junjian YI

Objectives: Better understanding of the dynamics of the COVID-19 (2019 novel coronavirus disease) pandemic to curb its spread is now a global imperative. While travel restrictions and control measures have been shown to limit the spread of the disease, the effectiveness of the enforcement of those measures should depend on the strength of the government. Whether, and how, the government plays a role in fighting the disease, however, has not been investigated. Here, we show that government management capacities are critical to the containment of the disease. Setting: We conducted a statistical analysis based on cross-city comparisons within China. China has undergone almost the entire cycle of the anticoronavirus campaign, which allows us to trace the full dynamics of the outbreak, with homogeneity in standards for statistics recording. Primary and secondary outcome measures: Outcome measures include city-specific COVID-19 case incidence and recoveries in China. Results: The containment of COVID-19 depends on the effectiveness of the enforcement of control measures, which in turn depends on the local government’s management capacities. Specifically, government efficiency, capacity for law enforcement, and the transparency of laws and policies significantly reduce COVID-19 prevalence and increase the likelihood of recoveries. The organisation size of the government, which is not closely related to its capacity for management, has a limited role.

LI, Wenchao; LI, Jing; and YI, Junjian. Government management capacities and the containment of COVID-19: A repeated cross-sectional study across Chinese cities. (2021). BMJ Open. 11, (4), 1-6.

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