主題｜Topic：Evaluating Air Pollution Regulation: Separating Firm Competitiveness and Ambient Effects
時間｜Time：04.24（周一）15: 30-16: 30
地點｜Venue：文澴樓709教室｜Class Room 709，WENHUAN
主講｜Speaker
張鵬博士現為香港中文大學（深圳）經管學院經濟學助理教授，發展經濟學頂級期刊 Journal of Development Economics 副主編，SSCI權威期刊 China Economic Review 副主編，廣東省傑出青年基金獲得者。張鵬博士研究方向為環境經濟學、發展經濟學、勞動經濟學和健康經濟學。他的論文發表在The Economic Journal，Journal of Public Economics， Journal of Development Economics（5篇）和Journal of Environmental Economics and Management（3篇）等。張鵬博士于2016年6月獲得美國加州大學聖芭芭拉分校 (University of California, Santa Barbara) 經濟學博士學位，并于2016-2020擔任香港理工大學經濟學助理教授。
摘要｜Abstract
Measuring environmental regulation’s effect on firm competitiveness is central to designing optimal policies. Existing studies document significant negative effects of air pollution regulations on manufacturing competitiveness as measured by total factor productivity (TFP). A separate literature finds that air pollution lowers TFP through its ambient effect on workers’ physical and mental health and cognition. Extant empirical measures of the competitiveness effect reflect both. We develop a boundary-discontinuity-difference-indifferences (BD-DD) approach to isolate the competitiveness effect based on the idea that only regulated firms suffer the competitiveness effect but both regulated and unregulated firms adjacent to each other enjoy the ambient effect via spillovers. We apply the approach to a major air pollution regulation in China. The traditional approach to estimating the regulation’s effects yields a 3.8% TFP decline among surviving firms at a total cost of CNY 30.2 billion annually. The true competitiveness effect is 6.4% (51.6 billion). The implied ambient effect is 2.6% (21.4 billion) among regulated firms. While difficult to quantify, the ambient effect is also enjoyed by all proximate unregulated firms. Consistent with this, we find that the ambient effect on control firms declines with distance from a treatment region.
