What Can Be Learned from the Recent Migrants?

The authors examine nine indicators of quality of life in the 277 U.S. Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs) in terms of their impact on the decision to migrate. The factors considered were utilized in the 1985 publication "Places Rated Almanac" and include climate, housing, health care, crime, transportation, education, recreation, arts, and economics. "The purpose of this paper is both to analyze several alternative methods by which the nine 'Places Rated' indicators have been combined in previous studies, and to estimate a new system of weights for combining such indicators from a multivariate model of metropolitan out-migration." In this article, the authors examine out-migration of metropolitan households during the years 1975-1980. "Coefficient estimates from a multivariate model of out-migration form the basis for a ranking of metropolitan areas in the third section. Also included are comparisons among this and other studies of both the implicit weights employed against the 'Places Rated' scores...to derive both overall measures of urban life quality, and how such quality varies by city size."     

Is environmental regulation a blessing or a curse for China's urban land use efficiency? Evidence from a threshold effect model

Severe land shortage causes a higher demand for domestic and foreign land‐intensive products. As a result, resource utilization, and related environmental issues, will increase in urban areas. To this respect, the analysis of the impact of environmental regulation on urban land use efficiency helps to identify potential points for interventions designed to ensure sustainable land use. This study first introduces a theoretical framework to investigate the micro‐transmission mechanism of environmental regulation on urban land use efficiency. Our profit decision‐making model concludes that the impact of environmental regulation on urban land use efficiency is influenced by changes in the industrial structure. Empirically, our preliminary analysis suggests that in addition to population density, both formal and informal environmental regulation can promote urban land use efficiency, with a significant spatial heterogeneity across the sample regions. Further, this study shows a remarkable double‐threshold relationship between formal environmental regulation and urban land use efficiency in China. We clarify and confirm that environmental regulation promoted urban land use efficiency only when regulation intensity was higher than 0.8612. Environmental regulation increased urban land use efficiency in high‐level industrial rationalization areas, whereas it had the opposite effect in low‐level ones. Furthermore, there was a clear marginal diminishing effect of the impact of environmental regulation on urban land use efficiency when the optimization of the industrial structure was set as a threshold variable.