Compact urban form is of great importance to facilitate low carbon development, while little empirical evidence was found about the impact of urban geometric form on household energy consumption with panel data; this paper uses a multi-time China land cover dataset to calculate the urban form of 253 prefecture-level cities for the years 2000, 2010 and 2020 and examines its impact on urban household energy consumption. We use urban land ruggedness as the instrumental variable for urban form. The results show urban form and household energy consumption are negatively related. The result is robust to several alternative specifications, including measuring the household energy consumption without central heating or controlling extreme weather year effect. Mechanism analysis shows compact geometric form reduces commuting time in larger and medium cities.

The effectiveness of housing purchase limits policies has aroused heated debate, yet few discussed its impact on educational capitalization. We examine the heterogeneous effect of housing purchase limits policy on the price of elite school district houses (ESDH) and non‐elite school district houses. By exploiting second‐hand houses data in Hefei China, we find that the price of ESDH has increased greatly after the limitation, compared with non‐elite school districts. Further we discover that the ESDH have lower depreciation risks, and their price is higher in neighborhoods with smaller dwelling area. Our finding indicates that the limits policy may have exacerbated the educational capitalization.