An analysis of various policy instruments to reduce congestion, fuel consumption and CO2 emissions in Beijing

Using a nested multinomial logit model of car ownership and personal travel in Beijing circa 2005, this paper compares the effectiveness of different policy instruments to reduce traffic congestion and CO2 emissions. The study shows that a congestion toll is more efficient than a fuel tax in reducing traffic congestion, whereas a fuel tax is more effective as a policy instrument for reducing gasoline consumption and emissions. An improvement in car efficiency would also reduce congestion, fuel consumption, and CO2 emissions significantly; however, this policy benefits only richer households that own a car. Low-income households do better under the fuel tax policy than under the efficiency improvement and congestion toll policies. The congestion toll and fuel tax require the travel cost per mile to more than triple. The responsiveness of aggregate fuel and CO2 are, approximately, a 1 percent drop for each 10 percent rise in the money cost of a car trip.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Airports and Air Services,Roads&Highways,Transport and Environment,Transport in Urban Areas,Urban Transport

Does Government Investment in Local Public Goods Spur Gentrification? Evidence from Beijing

In Beijing, the metropolitan government has made enormous place based investments to increase green space and to improve public transit. We examine the gentrification consequences of such public investments. Using unique geocoded real estate and restaurant data, we document that the construction of the Olympic Village and two recent major subway systems have led to increased new housing supply in the vicinity of these areas, higher local prices and an increased quantity of nearby private chain restaurants.

Self-Distillation Network with Ensemble Prototypes: Learning Robust Speaker Representations without Supervision

Training speaker-discriminative and robust speaker verification systems without speaker labels is still challenging and worthwhile to explore. Previous studies have noted a substantial performance disparity between self-supervised and fully supervised approaches. In this paper, we propose an effective Self-Distillation network with Ensemble Prototypes (SDEP) to facilitate self-supervised speaker representation learning. A range of experiments conducted on the VoxCeleb datasets demonstrate the superiority of the SDEP framework in speaker verification. SDEP achieves a new SOTA on Voxceleb1 speaker verification evaluation benchmark ( i.e., equal error rate 1.94\%, 1.99\%, and 3.77\% for trial Vox1-O, Vox1-E and Vox1-H , respectively), discarding any speaker labels in the training phase. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/3D-Speaker.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2211.0416

Chromosomal Instability-Driven Cancer Progression:Interplay with the Tumour Microenvironment and Therapeutic Strategies

Chromosomal instability (CIN) is a prevalent characteristic of solid tumours and haematological malignancies. CIN results in an increased frequency of chromosome mis-segregation events, thus yielding numerical and structural copy number alterations, a state also known as aneuploidy. CIN is associated with increased chances of tumour recurrence, metastasis, and acquisition of resistance to therapeutic interventions, and this is a dismal prognosis. In this review, we delve into the interplay between CIN and cancer, with a focus on its impact on the tumour microenvironment-a driving force behind metastasis. We discuss the potential therapeutic avenues that have resulted from these insights and underscore their crucial role in shaping innovative strategies for cancer treatment.</p

FunCodec: A Fundamental, Reproducible and Integrable Open-source Toolkit for Neural Speech Codec

This paper presents FunCodec, a fundamental neural speech codec toolkit, which is an extension of the open-source speech processing toolkit FunASR. FunCodec provides reproducible training recipes and inference scripts for the latest neural speech codec models, such as SoundStream and Encodec. Thanks to the unified design with FunASR, FunCodec can be easily integrated into downstream tasks, such as speech recognition. Along with FunCodec, pre-trained models are also provided, which can be used for academic or generalized purposes. Based on the toolkit, we further propose the frequency-domain codec models, FreqCodec, which can achieve comparable speech quality with much lower computation and parameter complexity. Experimental results show that, under the same compression ratio, FunCodec can achieve better reconstruction quality compared with other toolkits and released models. We also demonstrate that the pre-trained models are suitable for downstream tasks, including automatic speech recognition and personalized text-to-speech synthesis. This toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/FunCodec.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to ICASSP 202

The birth of edge cities in China: measuring the spillover effects of industrial parks

From its established status as a high-tech science park in 1988, Zhongguancun has been transformed from a village to China’s “Silicon Valley”. Zhongguancun’s big success has led many Chinese local governments to embrace ‘place-based’ investments and support the building of industrial parks (special economic zones, SEZ). In fact, this is a growing global trend. A recent Economist article, reported that there are more than 4,000 SEZs (industrial parks) around the world, ranging from basic export processing zones and science parks to more high-tech economic zones

Towards a System of Open Cities in China: Home Prices, FDI Flows and Air Quality in 35 Major Cities

Over the last thirty years, China's major cities have experienced significant income and population growth. Much of this growth has been fueled by urban production spurred by world demand. Using a unique cross-city panel data set, we test several hypotheses concerning the relationship between home prices, wages, foreign direct investment and ambient air pollution across major Chinese cities. Home prices are lower in cities with higher ambient pollution levels. Cities featuring higher per-capita FDI flows have lower pollution levels.

Political manipulation of urban land markets: evidence from China

Over the last forty years, China has experienced extraordinary growth under output market reforms, but the growth rates are now tapering off. Reforms in factor markets and city governance have been much slower and are viewed as having the potential to yield considerable efficiency gains. In this paper, we explore this possibility, tackling the key issues of local political manipulation of land markets and objectives of local leaders, constraints on the local budgetary process to finance infrastructure and capital market favoritism of certain cities. We use a structural general equilibrium model with trade and migration frictions, based on prefecture level data. We model the political process of land misallocation within cities which drives up housing prices and estimate city-by-city local leaders’ preferences over economic performance versus residents’ welfare. Counterfactual analysis shows that equalizing capital prices across cities, changing the political scorecard for city leaders to reward just maximization of local consumer welfare, and relaxing local budget constraints together increase welfare of consumers and returns to capital by 13.7% and 2.25% respectively. Housing prices would decline in almost all cities; and the reforms would reduce the current excessive, often showcase investment in local public infrastructure by 49% nationally. These reforms would significantly reduce the population of favored cities with low capital costs like Tianjin and Beijing and raise the population of cities with high costs of capital and low local-leader weights on consumer welfare like Shenzhen and Dongguan