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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]

This paper studies how the pollution reduction mandates imposed by China׳s central government in 2001 triggered unanticipated responses from its provinces. We apply the difference-in-differences-in-differences (DDD) method to a unique dataset on industry-level activities in counties along 24 major rivers in China from 1998 through 2008. We find that the most downstream county of a province has up to 20 percent more water-polluting activities than otherwise identical counties since 2001. Moreover, we find that the enforcement of pollution fee collection is more lenient in the most downstream county of a province, and that private firms contribute more to the downstream effect than state-owned enterprises and foreign firms. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the provincial governments respond to the pollution reduction mandates by shifting their enforcement efforts away from the most downstream county. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does it pay to be "greener" as a local official in China? In this paper, we examine the effect of local environment regulation outcomes, i.e., local pollution, on leaders' chances of promotion. This is an important question because only when the Chinese cadre evaluation system rewards local officials' green behaviors, these officials would move away from their past priority in promoting economic growth at all costs, so that the environmental crisis in China might be addressed. We collect party secretary data for Chinese counties between 2001 and 2014 to measure promotion patterns. We construct county-year SO2 and PM2.5 pollution measures using NASA satellite data. We adopt an instrumental variable approach to deal with potential endogeneity issues of the pollution variables: for both PM 2.5 and SO2, we use ventilation coefficient, i.e., the product of wind speed and mixing layer height, as the instrument. Our empirical analysis shows that for county party secretaries, those who are able to reduce air pollution are more likely to be promoted. We find similar results for county magistrates. However, we do not find evidence for this pollution-promotion link for prefecture and provincial party secretaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]