This paper examines the impact of a policy change in Tobin's tax on housing market speculators. The policy intervention effectively raised the transaction cost in the market segment with a high presence of speculators. Relative to the unaffected control sample, we find that the rise in...

Recent years have witnessed significant evolution in the structure and organization of China’s labor markets. While the majority of workers remain employed in public work units (state-owned enterprises and urban collectives), private sector employment in China hasexpanded significantly....

Despite ongoing restructuring of the Chinese economy, barriers to labor mobility and attendantstratification of China’s labor markets remain significant. Those barriers serve to reduce the efficiency of labor market allocations and accordingly inhibit wage equilibration and productivity...

Real estate indices based on appraisals or sale prices of properties are known for their slow response to market news. These indices can therefore be represented (in logarithm) as the sum of a latent "true" price index and a lagging error. We show that the latent appreciation return and the...

This paper develops a methodology to identify asset price response to news in the framework of the Campbell-Shiller log-linear present-value equation. We further show that a slow price adjustment in real estate markets not only induces a high serial autocorrelation in excess returns, but also...

The rapid pace of urbanization and income growth in China in the past decade, spurred in part by the liberalization of the urban housing and labor markets, resulted in considerable growth in urban land rents and wage-rates. The objective of this study is to examine the influence of urban quality...