arXiv subjects

Yong Tu

Publications and source records attributed to Yong Tu.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Price of Quietness: How a Pandemic Affects City Dwellers' Response to Road Traffic Noise

Using the outbreak of COVID-19 in Singapore as a quasi-natural experiment, we investigate tenants' changing responses to road traffic noise in the rental housing market, using 46,980 transaction records between 2006 and 2022. Our difference-in-differences estimates show that road traffic noise decreases housing rents by 3.8% immediately after the pandemic outbreak and further declines by 12.7% in the subsequent year-equivalent to 186.7 US dollars per month. The results are robust to parallel trend analysis, permutation placebo tests, and tests using alternative distance thresholds or distance to the nearest main road. Then, we adopt a machine learning text analysis of 10,425 rental housing advertisements, showing that tenants' preference for quietness increases by approximately 10% from 2019 into 2020. The new work-from-home business model and rising traffic from delivery services can explain for this pattern. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper using a large volume of transaction records to quantify city dwellers' willingness to pay for quietness in the COVID-19 context. Our results have policy implications for other nations and post-pandemic era on the interaction among urban planning, transport networks, and human settlements, and shed light on the pathway to achieve sustainable development goals.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

Social Integration and Housing Behaviours of Immigrants: Evidence from Singapore's Public Housing Market

This study investigates the impact of social integration on immigrants' housing behaviours from a temporal perspective, using Singapore's differential public housing policies on immigrants as a quasi-natural experiment. With the support of a local town council, we conducted a survey on social integration among 1,128 immigrant and local households living in public housing estates. In the public open rental housing market - primarily accommodating yet-to-integrate immigrants - we find immigrant renters live up to 3.04% farther from their workplace and pay lower rents up to 0.67% per additional year of residency. Such impacts are more substantial among minority ethnic groups. The results remain robust when using alternative subjective or objective measures of social integration. However, in the public resale housing market - primarily accommodating native and well-integrated naturalised citizens - we find that naturalised citizens face no price premiums relative to native homebuyers, implying no further effect of integration on housing prices after well-integration. This study extends the literature of spatial assimilation focusing on ethnic residential segregations and is generalizable to cities with few ethnic enclaves.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

Ageing in which place? Spatial analytical framework for evaluating ageing-in-place practices

Over the past decade, governments around the world have made significant investments in creating elderly-friendly urban environments within local neighborhoods. However, the lack of a standardized evaluation framework for Ageing-in-Place (AIP) practices makes it challenging to generalize these experiences. First, we compare the AIP models of the U.S.- San Francisco, Japan-Tokyo, and Singapore using a cost-benefit analysis, demonstrating the comparative advantage of the Singapore model in terms of low cost and high accessibility for the independent ageing population. Second, we propose a spatial analytics framework to visualize and quantify the degree of alignment between a basket of ageing facilities and the active ageing population, enabling a data-driven, timely evaluation of the effectiveness of Singapore's AIP policies. Singapore's AIP model, either in its entirety or as a hybrid with other models, can be generalized to other global cities, providing valuable insights for optimal elderly-friendly urban planning.

econ.GN↗