Investigating the dynamics of, and interactions between, Shanghai office submarkets

The Shanghai office market has developed rapidly over the past two decades. As a consequence of this development, two, apparently distinct, office submarkets, Puxi and Pudong have developed in central Shanghai. This raises the issue as to whether the Shanghai office market can be viewed as a homogeneous entity or whether there is imperfect substitutability across office locations within the city. The latter case raises the possibility of the existence of office submarkets. In this paper, we examine intra-metropolitan rental dynamics in the Puxi and Pudong submarkets, identifying any interrelationships between these markets, and consider whether they form distinct office submarkets. We find no interaction between the two submarkets. Further, we find no evidence of lead-lag relationships between the two submarkets. Finally, when we test for convergence in rental performance between the two submarkets, the tests reveal that we can reject the null of no convergence

An econometric analysis of Shanghai office rents

The modern commercial office market in Shanghai emerged with China’s economic reform and open door policy in the 1980s and grew rapidly at the beginning of 1990s,with increasing demand for office space from foreign and domestic occupiers. Though total real estate investment is skewed towards residential property, office investment has grown by 23% per annual in terms of value and by 24% per annum in terms of completed floor space from 1995 to 2007. The Shanghai office market is of importance for a number of reasons. First, it is one of the largest office markets in China in terms of square footage and in investment terms. Second, the office market is one of most established ones in China and attracts most attention from policy makers, investors, practitioners and academia. However, so far there is little empirical research on the Shanghai office market. This paper will use econometric modelling techniques to investigate office rent determination of the CBD in the central Puxi area, Shanghai, over the period 1991 –2007. Using a reduced form modelling specification in an error correction framework based on demand and supply interactions, GDP and office stock are found to significantly affect office rental performance in the Shanghai market in the long run. The model also shows that the office market adjusts to equilibrium. This model is then extended to test the impact of foreign direct investment, real interest rates, and vacancy rates on rental determination

A Tale of Two Chinese Cities: The Dynamics of Beijing and Shanghai Office Markets

Executive Summary. We analyze office rental pricing and adjustment processes in two Chinese cities: Beijing and Shanghai. The study period covers 17 years from 1993 to 2009. We find that rents in the two cities responds to demand and supply variables in the long-run model. In the short-run model, the error correction term is correctly signed and statistically significant in all model scenarios; however, adjustment is slower than other major office centers. In the short-run models, the rental adjustment process in Shanghai is affected by both supply and demand; in Beijing, only the vacancy rate has significant impact on rental adjustment. We further test the differences in vacancy rates in the two cities and find that individual city components are statistically significant and different from each other. Shanghai has a lower price elasticity and higher income elasticity than Beijing

Retail rent dynamics in two Chinese cities

This paper examines the retail rent dynamics of two Chinese cities, Beijing and Shanghai. We use an error correction modelling framework to estimate long-run equilibrium relationships and short-term dynamic corrections. The study period covers 1999–2012. We also run tests to examine the presence of structural breaks. The empirical results suggest that both supply and demand significantly affect retail rents for both cities in the long run. However, in the short term, the change of rent responds to change in income for Shanghai market. Both markets have a rapid speed of adjustment, especially Shanghai market that is more price and income elastic. The results shed some light on the behaviour of retail rent adjustment processes in one of the largest and fast growing emerging markets

Categorisation of built environment characteristics: the trouble with tertiles

BACKGROUND: In the analysis of the effect of built environment features on health, it is common for researchers to categorise built environment exposure variables based on arbitrary percentile cut-points, such as median or tertile splits. This arbitrary categorisation leads to a loss of information and a lack of comparability between studies since the choice of cut-point is based on the sample distribution. DISCUSSION: In this paper, we highlight the various drawbacks of adopting percentile categorisation of exposure variables. Using data from the SocioEconomic Status and Activity in Women (SESAW) study from Melbourne, Australia, we highlight alternative approaches which may be used instead of percentile categorisation in order to assess built environment effects on health. We discuss these approaches using an example which examines the association between the number of accessible supermarkets and body mass index. We show that alternative approaches to percentile categorisation, such as transformations of the exposure variable or factorial polynomials, can be implemented easily using standard statistical software packages. These procedures utilise all of the available information available in the data, avoiding a loss of power as experienced when categorisation is adopted.We argue that researchers should retain all available information by using the continuous exposure, adopting transformations where necessary

Broadening of the Derivative Discontinuity in Density Functional Theory

We clarify an important aspect of density functional theories, the broadening of the derivative discontinuity (DD) in a quantum system, with fluctuating particle number. Our focus is on a correlated model system, the single level quantum dot in the regime of the Coulomb blockade. We find that the DD-broadening is controlled by the small parameter $\Gamma/U$, where $\Gamma$ is the level broadening due to contacting and $U$ is a measure of the charging energy. Our analysis suggests, that Kondoesque fluctuations have a tendency to increase the DD-broadening, in our model by a factor of two.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

The Benefits of Diligence: How Precise are Predicted Gravitational Wave Spectra in Models with Phase Transitions?

Models of particle physics that feature phase transitions typically provide predictions for stochastic gravitational wave signals at future detectors and such predictions are used to delineate portions of the model parameter space that can be constrained. The question is: how precise are such predictions? Uncertainties enter in the calculation of the macroscopic thermal parameters and the dynamics of the phase transition itself. We calculate such uncertainties with increasing levels of sophistication in treating the phase transition dynamics. Currently, the highest level of diligence corresponds to careful treatments of the source lifetime; mean bubble separation; going beyond the bag model approximation in solving the hydrodynamics equations and explicitly calculating the fraction of energy in the fluid from these equations rather than using a fit; and including fits for the energy lost to vorticity modes and reheating effects. The lowest level of diligence incorporates none of these effects. We compute the percolation and nucleation temperatures, the mean bubble separation, the fluid velocity, and ultimately the gravitational wave spectrum corresponding to the level of highest diligence for three explicit examples: SMEFT, a dark sector Higgs model, and the real singlet-extended Standard Model (xSM). In each model, we contrast different levels of diligence in the calculation and find that the difference in the final predicted signal can be several orders of magnitude. Our results indicate that calculating the gravitational wave spectrum for particle physics models and deducing precise constraints on the parameter space of such models continues to remain very much a work in progress and warrants care.Comment: 43 pages, 16 figures, 1 tabl

The dark side of benzene: interference vs. interaction

We present the study of the linear conductance vs.\ applied gate voltage for an interacting six site ring structure, which is threaded by a flux of $\pi$ and coupled to a left and a right lead. This ring structure is designed to have a vanishing conductance for all gate voltages and temperatures provided interactions are ignored. Therefore this system is an ideal testbed to study the interplay of interaction and interference. First we find a Kondo type resonance for rather large hopping parameter. Second, we find additional resonance peaks which can be explained by a population blocking mechanism. To this end we have to extend the Kubo approach within the Density Matrix Renormalization Group method to handle degenerate states.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Constraints on holographic dark energy from X-ray gas mass fraction of galaxy clusters

We use the Chandra measurements of the X-ray gas mass fraction of 26 rich clusters released by Allen et al. to perform constraints on the holographic dark energy model. The constraints are consistent with those from other cosmological tests, especially with the results of a joint analysis of supernovae, cosmic microwave background, and large scale structure data. From this test, the holographic dark energy also tends to behave as a quintom-type dark energy.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures; to appear in Phys. Lett.