Research

Publications

Kieran Donaghy, Arash Beheshtian, Ziye Zhang, and Benjamin Brown-Steiner

Advances in Spatial Science (The Regional Science Series). Springer, Cham. 2021.

This book presents extensions to current commodity-flow models to analyze the economic and environmental impacts of recent structural changes, such as fragmentation of production and lengthening supply chains. The extensions enable augmented commodity-flow models to analyze the vulnerability of supply chains and regions to climate change and extreme weather events. The models allow the explicit treatment of trade in intermediate goods; the so-called “new economic geography” behavioral foundations for production and inter-industry and interregional trade; endogenous determination of capital investment and employment; and changes in emissions associated with production, consumption and freight movement. Presenting a modeling framework and simulations that are based on a thirty-year, spatial time-series of inter-industry and interstate trade in the US, this unique book is a valuable resource for regional scientists, economic geographers and transportation modelers, as well as environmental and atmospheric scientists.

Subjective or Objective Measures of Street Environment, Which are More Effective in Explaining Housing Prices?

Waishan Qiu, Ziye Zhang, Xun Liu, Wenjing Li , Xiaojiang Li, Xiang Xu, and Xiaokai Huang

Landscape and Urban Planning, 2022.

This paper constructs subjective measures of street quality in Shanghai using street view imagery (SVI), computer vision (CV), and machine learning (ML) models, and then compares their impacts on housing prices with objective measures'. Main findings include 1) both subjective and objective measures for street quality outperform conventional structural attributes; 2) objective view indexes collectively explain more price variances while subjective perceptions individually exhibited stronger associations with prices. Our study addresses the effectiveness of incorporating subjective perceptions at a micro level, as well as their complementary effects with the objective counterparts. It provides an important reference to urban planners for selecting street environment indicators to inform decisions on housing policy and urban design.

Linking local COVID-19 and population statistics to a U.S.-based survey we recently conducted, we study the spatial variation in the impact of COVID-19 on Americans’ attitudes toward China. The research strategy capitalizes on differential local COVID-19 incidence rates as varying dosages of the COVID-19 impact across local contexts in the U.S. Our results reveal negative yet heterogeneous effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on Americans’ attitudes toward China. We find that a greater local exposure to COVID-19 is associated with a lower level of trust in Chinese and a less favorable attitude toward China. These findings lend consistent support to the behavioral immune system theory by bridging the literature on contextual variations in public opinion, with broader implications for U.S.–China relations.

Working Papers

Work-In-Progress