How does air quality affect the willingness of graduate students to stay? Evidence from Beijing city, China

Since the reforming and opening up started in the late 1970s, China's economy boomed with the urbanization rate increasing consistently, in which urbanization has been playing a crucial role undoubtedly. As China's political and cultural center, Beijing city has gained dramatic development, which to a great extent is attributed to the great efforts of various kinds of talents, and college graduate students are a momentous component. However, since 2011, partly due to increasingly serious air pollution, college graduate students in Beijing have attached greater importance to air quality, and the proportion of staying in Beijing has been decreasing year by year. This study focuses on the impact of air quality on the willingness of college graduate students to stay in Beijing. Using the first-hand data of 522 valid samples collected by questionnaire survey, a carefully designed structural equation model with 5 latent variables and 25 effective observed variables is employed to conduct the empirical study. The empirical results indicate that subjective acceptance, urban public resources, family status and career planning have significant positive influences on the willingness of college students to stay in Beijing. Among them, urban public resources play the most important role. In contrast, living cost has a negative yet insignificant impact.