主题｜Topic：Evaluating Air Pollution Regulation: Separating Firm Competitiveness and Ambient Effects
时间｜Time：04.24（周一）15: 30-16: 30
地点｜Venue：文澴楼709教室｜Class Room 709，WENHUAN
主讲｜Speaker
张鹏博士现为香港中文大学（深圳）经管学院经济学助理教授，发展经济学顶级期刊 Journal of Development Economics 副主编，SSCI权威期刊 China Economic Review 副主编，广东省杰出青年基金获得者。张鹏博士研究方向为环境经济学、发展经济学、劳动经济学和健康经济学。他的论文发表在The Economic Journal，Journal of Public Economics， Journal of Development Economics（5篇）和Journal of Environmental Economics and Management（3篇）等。张鹏博士于2016年6月获得美国加州大学圣芭芭拉分校 (University of California, Santa Barbara) 经济学博士学位，并于2016-2020担任香港理工大学经济学助理教授。
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.
