Sihan Mao

Ph.D. Candidate in Urban Planning
Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California

Portrait of Sihan Mao

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Urban Planning at the Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California. I am on the 2026–27 academic job market.

My research examines how property rights, legal institutions, and public policy shape housing access and land markets. I am particularly interested in whose property rights governments recognize, how citizens challenge the land takings and zoning decisions that threaten their homes and businesses, and whether judicial reforms influence local land supply.

Methodologically, I combine program evaluation with legal and archival research, interviews, and spatial data science.

My dissertation has been supported by USC's Second Century Russell Dissertation Fellowship and a research grant from the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate.

Before starting my Ph.D., I was a consultant at the World Bank Beijing Office and a senior data analyst for the City of Pittsburgh. I hold a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Economics from Peking University.

Research

Working Papers

Property Rights and the Judicial Independence Reform: The Role of Courts in Land Takings and Planning Disputes Accepted for presentation at the 2026 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Annual Conference (ACSP) and the Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies Social Science Research Conference. Draft available upon request.

China moved fiscal and personnel controls over lower courts from local governments to provincial authorities to improve judicial independence or autonomy. This paper asks whether that reform changed plaintiffs' win probability in land- and property-related administrative cases and whether it influenced local land supply. I date each prefecture's reform from court budget and final-accounts disclosures. Using 85,080 first-instance administrative judgments between 2014 and 2020, I estimate staggered difference-in-differences models with the Sun and Abraham and the Callaway and Sant'Anna estimators. The reform raised the probability of a substantive win — meaning rescission of an action, an order requiring government action, or an award of compensation — by 5 percentage points. The estimates for the broader nominal-win outcome are not statistically significant; this does not establish that its probability was unchanged. The findings are consistent with increased access to substantive remedies. The reform effects are also visible in local land markets, as industrial land's parcel size and transaction prices fell, while the upper bound on planned residential floor-area ratios rose. The judicial independence reform made courts more willing to restrict local governments' behavior in administrative disputes that matter most for property rights, land tenure, and urban development.

Keywords judicial reform · administrative litigation · land supply · China · staggered difference-in-differences

Delayed Homes for Millennials: Measuring Entry to Homeownership by Birth Cohort and Race Accepted for presentation at the 2024 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Annual Conference (ACSP). Draft available upon request.

Publications

Research Assistantships

  • School Density and Inequality in Student Achievement with Jorge De la Roca and Petra Thiemann · work in progress
  • Not On My Street! Housing and Racial Effects of Atlanta Street Name Changes with Raphael Bostic, Jamie Chung, Jorge De la Roca, and Jessica Dill · work in progress
  • EthniCITY: Linguistic Landscape Data and Culture Hubs in Los Angeles with Annette Kim · interactive map
  • Trust, Transparency, and Technology: Building Digital Equity Through a Civic Digital Commons with Gwen Shaffer

Teaching

  • Housing and Land Use in Rapidly Urbanizing Regions Guest Lecturer, University of Southern California Spring 2026
  • Urban and International Development Teaching Assistant, University of Southern California · Instructor: Dr. Marlon Boarnet Spring 2025
  • Spatial Econometrics Guest Lecturer, University of Southern California Fall 2024
  • Real Estate Development Fundamentals Teaching Assistant, University of Southern California · Instructor: Dr. Jorge De la Roca Fall 2023
  • Data Science in Urban Design Guest Lecturer, Tianjin University Spring 2021
  • Microeconomics of Public Policy Teaching Assistant, University of Chicago · Instructor: Dr. Kerwin Charles Fall 2018

Professional Experience

  • Consultant EduBot Nigeria · Atlanta, GA 2025
  • Consultant, Urban Development World Bank · Beijing, China 2021–2023
  • Data Scientist City Quadrant Technology · Beijing, China 2020–2021
  • Senior Data Analyst City of Pittsburgh, Innovation & Performance · Pittsburgh, PA 2019–2020

Visualizations

Interactive tools I have built from research data. Open them and click around.

Two linked maps of Jinan: administrative court cases on the left, land transactions and land cover on the right Open the atlas

Dissertation data

Administrative Litigation and Land Development

A dual-pane atlas of the data behind my dissertation. The left map plots administrative court cases for a selected city and year; the right map overlays land transactions, land cover, and the built-up boundary for the same place. Pan or zoom either map and the other follows.

A second tab maps county-level land-taking compensation standards (yuan per mu) for all 31 provinces from 2010 to 2026. Each province has its own timeline, because each revises its schedule on its own calendar.

  • React
  • Mapbox GL
  • Cloudflare Workers
  • Python
  • GeoTIFF
Map of Los Angeles with coloured clusters marking cultural hubs by region of origin Open the map

Research assistantship

Cultural Hubs in Los Angeles

Collaboratively built for the EthniCITY project at the USC Spatial Analysis Lab (SLAB), directed by Professor Annette Kim. The map locates cultural hubs across Los Angeles County from linguistic landscape data.

  • Mapbox GL JS
  • Linguistic landscape data
  • Field survey
Screenshot of the AI Judge interface: a judgement pasted on the left, an AI-drafted re-judgement on the right

Prototype

AI Judge

A retrieval-augmented prototype for land-taking disputes. Paste a first-instance judgement on the left; the system retrieves the governing statutes, Supreme People's Court interpretations, and exemplary cases, then drafts an independent re-judgement on the right and marks where it diverges from the original ruling.

  • FastAPI
  • ChromaDB
  • RAG
  • BGE-M3 embeddings
  • Qwen