This paper develops a new factor-analysis-based (FAB) approach for choosing the optimal direction in a directional distance function (DDF) analysis. It has the combined merits of factor analysis and slacks-based measure (SBM) and incorporates the relative ease with which various input-output...

The Chinese central government has adopted a nationwide administrative allocation policy to reduce carbon and sulfur emissions. Using the ZSG-DEA (Zero-Sum Gain Data Envelopment Analysis) approach, this paper evaluates and compares the emission efficiencies of China's provincial CO2 and SO2, and...

Previous studies on traffic congestion have emphasized supply-side instruments, such as the expansion of road capacity and improving the management of traffic. However, researchers on transportation have identified several paradoxes in which the usual remedy for congestion-expanding the road...

Zipf's law has two striking regularities: excellent fit and an exponent close to 1.0. When the exponent equals 1.0, Zipf's law collapses into the rank-size rule. This paper alters the sample size, the truncation point, and the mix of cities in the sample to analyze the Zipf exponent. Our results...

Using firm-level data from a 2009 survey conducted in Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province, China, this paper examines impacts of technology capacity and value-chain position on firm's product competitiveness. Both technology capacity and product competitiveness are self-assessed relative to other...

High-speed rail (HSR) has led to a transportation revolution in China. This paper uses county-level panel data of China's Yangtze River region to investigate the effect of connecting to an HSR line on local economy. To address the issue of endogenous HSR route placement, we employ a...

This paper estimates the effect of high-speed rail (HSR) on city tourism. To identify the causal effect, we measure tourism outcomes with population flow data from Tencent migration big data and construct daily panel data of two national holidays from April 2015 to May 2019. Empirical results...

This paper examines the spatial pattern of worker residences with three different density functions: monocentric, polycentric and dispersive. Analysis of the 1980 journey-to-work census data for the Los Angeles region reveals that the polycentric density function statistically explains the...