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The first chapter of my dissertation uses a competition framework to reexamine the U.S. railway expansion from 1870 to 1890. Do reductions in trade costs increase the income levels of trading regions? The answer of most theoretical trade models is yes, and these models are used by policy-makers to justify investments in new transportation infrastructure to reduce trade costs. I reexamine this question by investigating the impact of the U.S. railway expansion from 1870 to 1890 on county economic growth. My main insight is that while the construction of a new transportation network can benefit a location by increasing producers' access to markets, it also can hurt a location by giving other locations a competitive edge. I derive and test empirically testable implications of the joint effects of market access and competition on economic outcomes from a multisector trade model. I find that on average more than 50% of the benefit of market access is offset by the negative effects of competition. Overall, I find that the expansion of railways increased agricultural land values by 20% to 40%, thus implying that railways explain 1% to 2% of 1890 GNP. My estimates of the impact of railways on American economic growth are lower than those of Donaldson and Hornbeck (2016) and closer to those of Fogel (1964).In the second chapter I study the effects of sector-specific productivity shocks on the distribution of production. The general-equilibrium trade model implies that the production in a certain location depends not only on its own productivity shocks but also on productivity shocks in competing locations. I derive several testable implications of the joint effects of one location's own productivity shock and productivity shocks in competing locations on the location's production. I test these implications by investigating the impact of the boll weevil in the early 20th century United States on the cotton belt's cotton acreage. I find (1) when few lands in the cotton belt were infested by the boll weevil, the presence of the boll weevil decreased the infested county's cotton acreage; (2) as the boll weevil expanded to more lands, the infested county's cotton acreage would gradually recover; (3) as the boll weevil expanded to more lands, cotton acreage in uninfested counties would increase. The movement of other economic outcomes which closely associated with the cotton production (such as corn acreage, total farm acreage, agricultural land value, population, and the tenancy system) mirrored the movement of the cotton acreage. My findings are in line with the argument that the boll weevil caused the internal shift in the cotton belt but rarely changed the whole cotton belt.In the third chapter, coauthored with Ming Gu, we discuss the long-run effects of the propaganda by the central government on people's preference formation. This link is taken as given but never proved in the previous literature. This paper examines the impact of government propaganda on people's attitudes towards gender equality in China, which imposes strict media censorship, advocates gender equality, and experiences growth in female labor participation. We find the high propaganda intensity would lead to progressive gender-related attitudes in female labor participation, but also conservative attitudes in housework share. It is consistent with the context of gender equality propaganda in China. Propaganda has larger positive effects on women than men. Women were affected in the age range between 0-25, while men were affected in the age range between 0-17. Propaganda also reduced boy preference for both men and women at the age range between 18-25, the marriage age and childbearing age of most Chinese.

Building landscape resilience inspires the cultivation of the landscape's capacity to recover from disruption and live with changes and uncertainties. However, integrating ecosystem and society within such a unified lens—that is, socio–ecological system (SES) resilience—clashes with many cornerstone concepts in social science, such as power, democracy, rights, and culture. In short, a landscape cannot provide the same values to everyone. However, can building landscape resilience be an effective and just environmental management strategy? Research on this question is limited. A scoping literature review was conducted first to synthesise and map landscape management change based on 111,653 records. Then, we used the Nuozhadu (NZD) catchment as a case study to validate our findings from the literature. We summarised current critiques and created a framework including seven normative categories, or common difficulties, namely resilience for "whom", "what", "when", "where", "why", as well as "can" and "how" we apply resilience normatively. We found that these difficulties are overlooked and avoided despite their instructive roles to achieve just landscape management more transparently. Without clear targets and boundaries in building resilience, we found that some groups consume resources and services at the expense of others. The NZD case demonstrates that a strategy of building the NZD's resilience has improved the conservation of the NZD's forest ecosystems but overlooked trade-offs between sustaining people and the environment, and between sustainable development for people at different scales. Future researchers, managers, and decision-makers are thereby needed to think resilience more normatively and address the questions in the "seven difficulties" framework before intervening to build landscape resilience.

Introduction -- PART I: Virtual Water and Water Footprint Accounting -- The Concepts of Virtual Water and Water Footprint -- Water Footprint Accounting Method -- PART II: Evaluation of Water Stresses Based on WFs -- Studies on the Evaluation of Water Footprints at Various Regional Scales -- Principal Water Stress Analysis Indexes and Approaches Based on WFs -- PART III: Study Cases: Water Stress Evaluation Under Multiple Regional Scales -- Study Cases: Water Stresses Evaluation at the Provincial Scale —the Zhejiang Province Case Study -- Study Case: Evaluation of Water Stresses at the River Basin Scale — the Haihe River Basin Case Study -- Case Study: Evaluation of Water Stresses at the City Scale —Dalian -- Comparisons of the Major Indexes on Water Stresses Analysis under Multiple Regional Scales -- PART IV: Water Footprint Accounting Application in Water Management Strategies -- Influencing Factors Analysis of Water Footprint Based on Extended STIRPAT Model -- Optimal Water Utilization and Allocation Strategy based on Water Footprint Accounting -- Conclusions

Xiuyan Jade, produced in Xiuyan County, Liaoning Province, China is one of the four famous jade in China. King Jade, which is deemed the largest jade body of the world, was broken out from a hill. The local government planned to build a tourism site based on the jade culture there. The purpose of the investigation was to evaluate the stability of subsurface foundation, and the possible positions of mined-out zones to prevent the further rolling of the jade body. Cross-hole radar tomography is the key technique in the investigation. Conventional travel time and attenuation tomography based on ray tracing theory cannot provide high-resolution images because only a fraction of the measured information is used in the inversion. Full-waveform inversion (FWI) can provide high-resolution permittivity and conductivity images because it utilizes all the information provided by the radar signals. We deduce the gradient expression of the time-domain FWI with respect to the permittivity and conductivity using a method that is different from that of the previous work and realize the FWI algorithm that can simultaneously update the permittivity and conductivity by using the conjugate gradient method. Inverted results from synthetic data show that time-domain FWI can significantly improve the resolution compared with the ray-based tomogram methods. FWI can distinguish targets that are as small as one-half to one-third wavelength and the inverted physical values are closer to the real ones than those provided by the ray tracing method. We use the FWI algorithm to the field data measured at Xiuyan jade mine. Both the inverted permittivity and conductivity can comparably delineate four mined-out zones, which exhibit low-permittivity and low-conductivity characteristics. Furthermore, the locations of the interpreted mined-out zones are in good agreement with the existing mining channels recorded by geological data.

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the concept of tradable driving credits (TDC) as an alternative to road pricing and driving restriction measures. However, empirical research into drivers' responses to a TDC measure is limited and even lacking for the Chinese context where the concept of TDC has attracted considerable attention. This paper reports the results of a survey that was the first to investigate drivers' willingness to change car use under a hypothetical distance-based TDC measure in China (Beijing) and aimed to compare these results with the results of a comparative Dutch survey. We observed that willingness to change was considerably higher in Beijing than in the Netherlands and that a substantial share of Beijing car owners indicated an increase in car use. In both contexts, higher education and higher car use intensity had a positive effect on the willingness to change, whereas higher income had a negative effect. We found mixed results for household size, respondents' car attitudes, and TDC scenario characteristics.