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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate public transportation efficiency in larger cities. Global agreements to decrease environmental emissions in the future (CO₂), world‐wide decreasing reserves of oil, and growing population in larger cities is the main motivation to develop efficiency benchmarking measurement models for public transportation systems, and gives reason for this research work. Also, from the point of view of the city, data envelopment analysis (DEA) based efficiency measurement has not been researched earlier, which is another motivation for this study from the method development perspective.

Four different DEA‐based efficiency benchmarking models are used to evaluate public transportation efficiency in larger cities. Data are from year 2001, and amount of analyzed cities in smaller DEA model is 52 and in larger 43. This gives statistical significance and efficiency measurement confidence over the results.

Medium‐sized, old and central European cities such as Bern, Munich, Prague and Zürich show frontier performance in all four models. Mega‐cities fail to reach frontier and/or good performance in small “services used” DEA model. However, some other medium‐sized cities show contrarian behaviour for “space used” DEA model. Lowest performance is more divergent in the analyses, but is found from Spanish cities, Athens, Middle East and North America. The author also found support from regression analysis that higher DEA efficiency results in lower share of private car use in large cities.

This research work uses only year 2001 data, and should be repeated in the future as public transportation data18base is being updated. The research is also limited on the use of DEA method, and other efficiency measurement methods should be used to verify the results further.

According to the author's knowledge, this research work is seminal from the city‐level DEA efficiency benchmarking studies concerning public passenger transportation systems. Earlier research works have concerned actors (e.g. bus companies or rail operators), but the overall picture from the city level has not been researched before.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the banking experiences and awareness of marketing efforts of banks among youth in mainland China.

Four focus-group interviews were conducted. A convenience sample of 26 participants aged 17 to 20 years was recruited in Laiwu, Shandong, a medium-sized city in China. They were asked to report experiences that could illustrate good and bad banking services. They were also asked to recall bank marketing promotions.

Participants’ perceived service quality of banks was determined by staff attitude, service delivery, physical environment and comparison of user experience. The marketing communication activities they recalled most frequently included product placements, advertising slogans, entertaining commercials and co-branding with online games.

The findings were based on a non-probability sample. The study also did not differentiate between personal experience and indirect experience with family and friends. Similar studies can be conducted in large cities or in rural China to compare banking experiences in different social economic settings. Further studies can be designed using quantitative methodology to measure the importance of various factors in influencing perceptions of service quality. Online banking experience can also be studied in the future.

Banks in China can enhance their competitiveness and brand reputation through raising the professionalism of their front-line staff, improving efficiency and transparency and streamlining the service process. Banks can make contacts with youth through offline and online promotional activities, such as co-branding with popular online games.

This is the first study on banking services among youth conducted in a medium-sized city in China.

Whether training contributes to stabilizing employment among rural migrant workers in cities remains unclear. Based on this gap in the research, the purpose of this paper is to examine how on-the-job training affects rural migrant workers’ job mobility in China.

By using randomly sampled survey data on migrant workers in Liaoning province in 2014, the authors applied a logistic model and survival analysis to explore the effect of on-the-job training on migrant workers’ job turnover and understand workers’ job change behaviour after receiving on-the-job training.

The results showed that job training provided by employers can significantly reduce migrant workers’ turnover by increasing specific human capital. By contrast, training provided by the government or migrant workers themselves focuses on increasing general human capital and thus fails to reduce job turnover. Moreover, further discussion revealed that, in the trained group, those people with a short tenure and low wage in the first job, people without any skills before migration, male migrant workers, and people that work in medium-sized and large cities have a higher probability of changing jobs. These findings suggest that to tackle the high rate of job mobility among rural migrant workers, firms should entice this labour to train by adjusting their internal training mechanisms, and local governments should subsidize firms that provide on-the-job training for rural migrant workers to help share the costs and risks of training. Moreover, for sake of reducing job changing among those trained workers, firms even should take actions to protect their labour rights of migrant workers and to ensure that they receive equal treatment to their urban counterparts.

This paper makes three contributions to the field of job mobility in China. First, it explores the mechanism between on-the-job training and rural migrant workers’ job mobility. Second, it empirically analyses the effect of on-the-job training on migrant workers’ job mobility as well as the different effects of general and specific training. Lastly, its results have important policy implications for the employment stability of rural migrant workers.

The purpose of this study is to regard winter heating as a quasi-natural experiment to identify the possible causal effects of winter heating on population mobility. However, there are scant research studies examining the effect of atmospheric quality on population mobility. There also exists some relevant research studies on the relationship between population mobility and environmental degradation (Lu et al., 2018; Reis et al., 2018; Shen et al., 2018), and these studies exist still some deficiencies.

The notorious atmospheric quality problems caused by coal-fired heating in winter of northern China have an aroused widespread concern. However, the quantitative study on the effects on population mobility of winter heating is still rare. In this study, the authors regard the winter heating as a quasi-natural experiment, based on the of daily panel data of 58 cities of Tencent location Big Data in China from August 13 to December 30 in 2016 and August 16 to December 30 in 2017, and examine the impacts of winter heating on population mobility by utilizing a regression discontinuity method.

The findings are as follows, in general, winter heating significantly aggravates regional population mobility, but the impacts on population mobility among different cities are heterogeneous. Specifically, the effects of winter heating on population mobility is greater for cities with relatively good air quality, and the effects is also more obvious for big and medium-sized cities than that in small cities. In addition, different robustness tests, including continuity test, different bandwidth tests and alternative empirical model, are adopted to ensure the reliability of the conclusion. Finally, the authors put forward corresponding policy suggestions from the three dimensions of government, enterprises and residents.

First, regarding winter heating as a quasi-natural experiment, a regression discontinuity design method is introduced to investigate the relationship between winter heating and population mobility, which is helpful to avoid the estimation error caused by endogeneity. Second, the authors use the passenger travel “big data” based on the website of Tencent Location Big Data, which can effectively capture the daily characteristics of China's population mobility. Third, this study discusses the population mobility from the perspective of winter heating and researches population mobility before and after winter heating, which is helpful in enriching the research on population mobility.

Enhancing the resilience of cities and strengthening risk-informed decision-making are defined as key within the Global Agenda 2030. Implementing risk-informed decision-making also requires the consideration of scenarios of exposure and vulnerability. Therefore, the paper presents selected scenario approaches and illustrates how such vulnerability scenarios can look like for specific indicators and how they can inform decision-making, particularly in the context of urban planning.

The research study uses the example of heat stress in Ludwigsburg, Germany, and adopts participatory and quantitative forecasting methods to develop scenarios for human vulnerability and exposure to heat stress.

The paper indicates that considering changes in future vulnerability of people is important to provide an appropriate information base for enhancing urban resilience through risk-informed urban planning. This can help cities to define priority areas for future urban development and to consider the socio-economic and demographic composition in their strategies.

The value of the research study lies in implementing new qualitative and quantitative scenario approaches for human exposure and vulnerability to strengthen risk-informed decision-making.

China has had a long and varied urban history dating back more than 2000 years. Throughout the imperial period (221 BC‐1911 AD), the Chinese dynasties established administrative centres throughout their empire and domestic trade flourished, especially in China's major river basins. As a result, cities of different sizes were exceptionally evenly distributed across the country and most of its citizens were influenced by some kind of urban centre. In fact, even before the mid‐nineteenth century, China had the largest number of city dwellers in the world. But China's bureaucratically‐controlled and evenly‐distributed urban configuration began to change after Britain's conquest of China in the Opium War of 1842 (Whyte and Parish, 1984). Once China's treaty ports like Shanghai, Nanking, Tientsin, and Wuhan were opened to foreign trade by the British, they started to grow disproportionately as thousands of people migrated to these cities, concentrating the country's urban population in the central and coastal areas. Soon, problems like unemployment, crime, prostitution, and drug addiction reached epidemic proportions in China's rapidly expanding cities. Consequently, when the Communists took control of China's government in 1949, they were determined to decentralise the country's urban population, to restrict urban growth, and to purge big cities of the social pathologies which had plagued them since initial contact with the West one hundred years earlier. It is, therefore, interesting to analyse each of the three major periods of China's urbanisation under Communist rule up to 1982, the year of the most recent national population census — that is, 1949 to 1960, 1961 to 1976, and 1977 to 1982 — and to discuss the most salient demographic developments during each of these periods.

Previous research has generally assumed that a homogeneous cultural value exists within a given country. This research aims to identify the regional differences in cultural value based on an urbanization dimension in China, which generate diversity with regard to perceived value and consumer decision‐making styles.

A large‐scale questionnaire was administered to freshmen from major colleges and universities across China to measure cultural value, perceived value, and consumer decision‐making style. The data were analyzed with a multi‐group structural equation model and a stepwise discrimination test.

Results demonstrated significant differences in cultural value, perceived value and consumer decision‐making style among regions with different degrees of urbanization and revealed antecedents and formation of the mechanism of decision‐making style.

Future research should explore more antecedents that influence consumer decision‐making styles and other market dimensions other than urbanization.

The research might provide prominent guidelines for marketers to understand Chinese consumers. Specifically, in regions with different degrees of urbanization, marketers should develop differential strategies to exploit the market given the distinctions in cultural value, perceived value and consumer decision‐making styles.

This study is the first to build a theoretical relational model of cultural value, perceived value and consumer decision‐making styles. And this model revealed the antecedents and formation of the mechanism of decision‐making style.

This study aims to analyze the relevance of the city spatial structure for smart city innovation from the perspective of agglomeration externalities, and discusses whether there is heterogeneity in innovation across different geographical areas and population scales of cities.

The authors construct the centralization and concentration indexes to conceptualize the city spatial structure of 286 cities (prefecture-level) in China based on the LandScan Global Population Dataset from 2001 to 2016. A fixed-effects panel data model is employed to analyze the relationship between the spatial structure and the innovation ability of smart cities; the results were validated through robustness tests and heterogeneity analyses.

The study found that the more concentrated and more evenly the distribution of urban population, namely the more city spatial structure tends to be weak-monocentricity, the higher the level of innovation in smart cities. The relevance of the weak-monocentricity structure and smart city innovation varies significantly depending on their geographical location and the size of the city. This result is more applicable to cities in the eastern and central regions, as well as to cities with smaller populations.

The adjustment and optimization of the city spatial structure is important for enhancing smart city construction. Unlike previous studies, which mostly use a single dimension of “the proportion of population in sub-centres to the population of all central areas” to measure city spatial structure, the authors employed the spatial centralization and spatial concentration. It is hoped that this study can guide smart city construction from the perspective of the development model of city spatial structure.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a methodology to assess urban sustainability within built, urban, territorial and landscape heritage, considering that cultural heritage has recently emerged as one of the keys of urban and territorial sustainability due to its inherent properties of durability and adaptability to changes over time. The implementation pivots on a case study based on medium-sized historical cities. Both academic and official documents consider this urban category as particularly likely to demographic, environmental and economic sustainability.

The methodology used begins with a theoretical approach, case study delimitation and presentation of existing indicator-based systems that include heritage concerns. Then, the criteria for the selection and creation of indicators are settled to create an ad hoc system. This is tested for the case study of medium-sized historical cities in inner Andalusia, Spain.

The results obtained are merged and represented for further discussion. First, this methodology states the need of including cultural heritage aspects within sustainability assessment, especially when urban and territorial historic fabrics are involved. Second, a correlation between heritage preservation and the general level of sustainability is revealed.

Finally, the results provide the basis for decisions to academic, technical and administrative spheres regarding urban and territorial sustainability, especially when dealing with the incorporation of cultural heritage factors and the assessment of medium-sized cities-based case studies.