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Does environmental quality affect firms’ activities that might improve that quality? In this paper, we use China's public heating policy as a quasi-experiment to investigate the impact of exogenous pollution differences on green innovation behavior. We use a regression discontinuity model, and carry out a suite of robustness tests. We consistently find that firms located in cities with an exogenous source of heavy pollution tend to adopt green innovation at a lower rate while we find no difference in the rate at which they adopt non-green innovation. We find a strong causal effect: being north of the boundary, where pollution levels are higher, leads firms to adopt less green innovation. Firms located in the heating areas report roughly 1 less green innovation per billion RMB of assets, a substantial difference given the average number of green innovations per billion RMB of assets of northern firms is 0.641.

This study applies functional Benefit Transfer via Meta-Regression Modeling to derive valuation estimates for wetlands in an actual policy setting of proposed groundwater transfers in Eastern Nevada. We illustrate how Bayesian estimation techniques can be used to overcome small sample problems notoriously present in Meta-functional Benefit Transfer. The highlights of our methodology are: (i) The hierarchical modeling of heteroskedasticity; (ii) The ability to incorporate additional information via refined priors; and (ii) The derivation of measures of model performance with the corresponding option of model-averaged Benefit Transfer predictions. Our results indicate that economic losses associated with the disappearance of these wetlands can be substantial and that primary valuation studies are warranted.