Search

This paper studies how centralizing environmental administration affects air pollution in China. China launched a reform in 2016 to empower upper-level environmental protection bureaus to administer lower-level bureaus vertically through personnel control. Exploiting a stacked difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the reform significantly reduced air pollution. The effect was stronger in places where pollution was less likely to be affected by spillovers from other provinces, where local governments initially paid less attention to environmental protection, and where there was less economic importance. Further analysis shows that the reform reduced pollution by strengthening the pollution reduction incentives of local environmental officials, increasing the intensity of local environmental inspection, and promoting environmental compliance by polluting firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper exploits the information disclosure and dissemination of environmental punishments on housing prices. As environmental quality is hardly ameliorated in the short run, the environmental punishments normally convey bad news of environmental quality rather than good news to housing market. The information disclosure of environmental punishment adds new pollution source information to the public. Employing the micro databases of firm-level environmental punishments and housing resale transactions in Beijing from January 2015 to December 2017, this research reveals that the transaction prices of houses within 0.5 km distance from the environmentally punished firms decrease by 1.84% on average and the overlapping effects of environmental punishments are fortified by multiple environmental punishments. In addition, the negative effects are amplified in the heating seasons and in the national important events. Unfortunately, we find little evidence of environmental punishments in the rental housing market. This paper identifies three mechanisms of environmental punishments on housing prices. The first mechanism is information disclosure, which proves that the impacts of environmental punishments on housing prices magnify if the information of environmental punishments is released to the public and reinforce with environmental information searching. The second mechanism is information dissemination, which corroborates that the negative effects of environmental punishments on housing transaction prices decay with distance and over time. The third mechanism is health concern arising from environmental punishments, which documents that relative to the unmarried young homebuyers, the older homebuyers and homebuyers with children have stronger responses to the environmental punishments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plastic waste trade has grown considerably in the last decades and has led to severe environmental problems in recipient countries. Being the largest recipient, China has permanently banned the imports of plastic waste since 2018. This paper examines the causal effect of plastic waste imports on air pollution by exploiting China's experience of importing plastic waste and the recent import ban. By combining data on plastic waste imports with PM 2.5 data at the city level for the years 2000–2011, we find that plastic waste imports increased PM 2.5 density significantly in recipient cities. To evaluate the impact of the import ban on air quality, we employ daily data on air pollution between 2015 and 2020. Our difference-in-differences results show that affected cities, relative to other cities, experienced considerable improvement in air quality following the ban. Further analysis reveals that increased incineration of non-recycled waste is the main channel. These findings provide insights into the costs of importing plastic waste and the potential environmental gains from banning such imports in other countries. • We assess the environmental impact of plastic waste trade in the context of China. • Chinese cities that imported more plastic waste experienced an increase in PM2.5 density between 2000 and 2011. • The primary factor contributing to worsened air quality was the increased incineration of non-recycled waste. • China's import ban in 2018 effectively improved air quality. • The findings highlight the importance of designing effective policies to regulate international trade in waste and domestic waste management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the mortality impacts of ozone pollution in China and the moderating effects of two possible adaptation strategies. Using an instrument variable constructed from ozone concentrations of nearby upwind cities, we find that ozone pollution significantly increases all-cause, cardiovascular, and respiratory mortality. Healthcare service provision significantly decreases the impacts of ozone pollution on all-cause and cardiovascular mortality, but does not moderate the impact on respiratory mortality. The impact of ozone on RES mortality declines after COVID-19. Healthcare service provision also reduces the distributional impact of ozone across the elderly and younger groups. Projection shows that climate change would induce mortality costs of 0.08% of China's GDP through increasing ozone pollution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we assess the effectiveness of early climate policy in emerging economies by causally evaluating the impact of China's Low-carbon City Pilot (LCCP) on city-level per-capita CO 2 emissions and CO 2 intensity of GDP over the period 2003–2017. The idiosyncrasies of the policy design pose significant challenges for causal identification, which we overcome within a synthetic control framework. Contrary to previous contributions, our results suggest that the LCCP had no significant impact on either carbon emissions or intensity. The main takeaway of our empirical investigation is that even in emerging economies, effective environmental policy requires transparent, quantifiable targets, and credible enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy interaction is an important way to deal with increasingly complex environmental problems. This paper examines the investment-related tax cuts and the policy interaction with environmental regulation on firms' emission reduction strategies. Taking China's value-added tax (VAT) reform as a quasi-natural experiment and considering the interaction with the emission reduction target policy, our difference-in-differences estimation shows that: the average effect of the VAT reform reduces firms' sulfur dioxide (SO 2) emission intensity by 16.6%, due to the adoption of emissions reduction strategies in the production processes; the interaction effect between the VAT reform and environmental regulation incentivizes firms to additionally reduce SO 2 emission intensity, due to the adoption of both production processes and end-of-pipe reduction strategies. Our findings are more evident for firms with tight financial constraints. Overall, this paper reveals the micro-mechanisms of how the tax policies incentivize firms to choose emission reduction strategies and highlights the importance of the interaction effects between environmental and non-environmental policies, thus providing implications for the policy mix of environmental regulation and tax-cut incentives to promote pollution reduction and improve business performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Severe air quality hurts human capital and threatens innovative outcomes. Using unique data containing 12.8 million patent applications in China, this paper examines the causal effect of particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 μm or less (PM 2.5) on patent innovation. We estimate a two-stage least square model with thermal inversion as an instrumental variable. Our findings show that a one μg/m3 increase in the annual average PM 2.5 concentration leads to a 1.3% decrease in the number of patents. Annual fluctuations in PM 2.5 concentration levels across cities caused the total number of patents to decrease by 1.1% during the 2006–2010 period. From 2011 to 2015, the improvement in air quality increased the number by about 2.0%. It demonstrates another innovation co-benefit of improving air quality due to the tightened regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following market liberalization, the vehicle population in China has increased dramatically over the past few decades. This paper examines the causal impact of the opening of a heavily used high speed rail line connecting two megacities in China in 2015, Chengdu and Chongqing, on air pollution. We use high-frequency and high spatial resolution data to track pollution along major highways linking the two cities. Our approach involves the use of a novel augmented regression discontinuity in time approach that incorporates machine learning to inform our specification choice in the first stage. Our estimates show that CO is reduced by 6.4% and PM 2.5 by 7.1% along the main affected highway. These findings are supported using a difference-in-differences approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the emission leakage by the regional environmental regulation applied in Beijing and its surrounding area. Using the unique firm-level daily emission data, we develop a novel model to estimate the size of immediate leakage through the price mechanism. Our empirics find that leakage offsets about 60% of the total amount of emission reduction in the regulated region and the aggregate emission reduction is less than two percent. We also use the iron and steel industry as an example to show how the prices of input and output factors respond to the regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the impact on air pollution of China's 2017 policy banning waste imports. We exploit a difference-in-differences strategy combining the time variation and cross-prefecture variation in waste imports before the policy change. We find that prefectures that imported waste in the prepolicy period experienced greater air quality improvements after the policy shock. This effect is stronger in regions with loose environmental regulations and poor waste utilization capacity. Further investigation shows that reductions in both the burning of unrecyclable waste and the level of industrial production are channels through which the waste import ban reduced air pollution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses mental health responses to information on environmental risks. We exploit the progressive implementation of a national program in China that introduces more comprehensive air pollution monitoring and provides real-time air-pollution information to the public. The program leads to a sharp increase in public awareness and attention to air pollution issues and results in a large increase in the sensitivity of individual's mental health to changes in air quality, especially among those with more exposure to pollution information and those more susceptible to mental illnesses. Information of worsening air quality has a direct effect on mental health as a source of stressors and an indirect behavioral effect through reducing outdoor activities and social integration. Our findings shed light on the design and delivery of environmental information disclosure programs, especially for countries with pressing environmental threats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the environmentally induced behavioral biases in the land market and shows how buyers correct their biases by learning from repeated transactions. Using a sample of government land sales along two sides of the heating service line in China, we first show land parcels transacted in the south in the winter are associated with an average price discount of 7.1%, compared to transactions in the north where heating service is provided. We discuss three possible explanations, including projection bias, incorrect belief, and salience bias. We find adverse weather such as low temperature and extreme weather may trigger the mispricing in the absence of the heating service, lending support to the projection bias. Moreover, our empirical investigations suggest the local government, as the only land seller, responds weakly to such biases. We also provide suggestive evidence that individual buyers in the south can learn from prior experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]