We revisit the classic "market vs. planning" debate in economic coordination in the context of achieving a predetermined target of emission abatement, by comparing a Cap-and-Trade market versus an ex-ante optimal allocative plan of non-tradable permits. We show that the market can address incomplete information about the abatement cost, but not heterogeneous local externalities of abatement, while the opposite is true for planning, constituting a trade-off in policy design. Applying the theoretical results to China's carbon abatement, we find that a hybrid scheme that combines subnational planning with segregated subnational markets can improve upon both the market-and planning-alone approaches.

China’s sudden Lifting of zero-COVID controls in December 2022 triggered a nationwide mortality surge. Using verifiable death records of social elites, such as academicians and key political figures, we estimate a conservative lower bound on excess mortality during the exit wave. We find that elite weekly mortality rates rose 5–tenfold in the weeks following the reopening, implying at least 1.44 million excess deaths nationally. Nevertheless, further analysis reveals that China’s total mortality cost during the entire pandemic remains low relative to comparable countries, as COVID-19 was largely under control from 2020 to 2022. The deaths of social elites highlight the pandemic’s reach across all societal strata and have far-reaching impacts on society. Using academia as an example, we demonstrate that while the deaths of academicians result in significant losses of valuable expertise, those deaths enhance academic upward mobility and accelerate generational turnover. Our findings underscore the need for better preparedness in future public health emergencies.

This paper estimates the impact of ambient air pollution on the two most economically costly airborne respiratory diseases, COVID-19 and influenza. Our methods incorporate the epidemiological Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered-Deceased (SIRD) model to construct the outcome of interest, the Instrumental Variable (IV) model to establish causality, and the Flexible Distributed Lag (FDL) model to capture dynamic effects. Analyzing data from the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, we find that air pollution can significantly raise the daily growth rate of COVID-19. In contrast, air pollution shows small and statistically insignificant effects on influenza healthcare visits in Japan.

We conducted a nationwide field experiment in China to evaluate the direct and indirect impacts of assigning firms to public or private citizen appeals when they violate pollution standards. There are three main findings. First, public appeals to the regulator through social media substantially reduce violations and pollution emissions, while private appeals cause more modest environmental improvements. Second, public appeals appear to tilt regulators’ focus away from facilitating economic growth and toward avoiding pollution-induced public unrest. Third, pollution reductions by treated firms are not offset by control firms, based on randomly varying the proportion of treated firms at the prefecture level. (JEL D22, L82, P28, P31, Q52, Q53, Q58)

We examine the impact of clean drinking water on infant mortality in China using a novel instrumental variable: the least-cost distance of piped water infrastructure between water sources and infant mortality surveillance areas. We find that the provision of piped water significantly decreases infant mortality, with a 10 percentage point increase in piped water coverage reducing infant mortality by 15%. Compared with regions with highly polluted surface waters, access to piped water is particularly beneficial in regions with slightly polluted surface waters, in which the pollution is difficult to observe. A simple cost-benefit analysis indicates that the benefits of piped water provision in rural China significantly outweigh the estimated costs.

Following the Fukushima nuclear accident, Japan gradually shut down all its nuclear power plants, causing a countrywide power shortage. In response the government launched large-scale energy-saving campaigns to reduce electricity consumption. Exploiting the electricity-saving targets across regions and over time, we show that the campaigns significantly increased mortality, particularly during extremely hot days. The impact is primarily driven by people using less air conditioning, as encouraged by the government. Nonpecuniary incentives can explain most of the reduction in electricity consumption. Our findings suggest there exists a trade-off between climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation. (JEL I12, L94, L98, Q48, Q54, Q58)

evaluator at the beginning of their evaluation cycle, the evaluating supervisor gave a significantly more positive assessment of the CGCS’ performance at the end of their cycle than their non-evaluating counterpart. In these instances, evaluating supervisors gave the CGCS a score 0.31 higher on average than non-evaluating supervisors along an overall 1 (bottom) – 7 (top) ranking of CGCS performance. Conversely, under the masked scheme CGCS received similar assessment scores from both supervisors. Further, researchers found colleagues of CGCS in the revealed scheme group were 5.8 percentage points more likely than colleagues in the masked group to predict that the evaluating supervisors’ assessment would be more positive than the non-evaluating supervisor’s assessment (a 10 percent increase over an average likelihood of 54 percent of colleagues in the masked group). These results suggest CGCS carried out influence activities when they knew who their evaluating supervisor was, and that these influence activities in turn led to more positive assessments from the evaluating supervisor–an impact which was visible to CGCS’ colleagues

Rising consumer demand for online food delivery has increased the consumption of disposable cutlery, leading to plastic pollution worldwide. In this work, we investigate the impact of green nudges on single-use cutlery consumption in China. In collaboration with Alibaba's food-delivery platform, Eleme (which is similar to Uber Eats and DoorDash), we analyzed detailed customer-level data and found that the green nudges-changing the default to "no cutlery" and rewarding consumers with "green points"-increased the share of no-cutlery orders by 648%. The environmental benefits are sizable: If green nudges were applied to all of China, more than 21.75 billion sets of single-use cutlery could be saved annually, equivalent to preventing the generation of 3.26 million metric tons of plastic waste and saving 5.44 million trees.

The Intelligent Earth (iEarth) framework, composed of four major themes: iEarth data, science, analytics, and decision, is proposed to define and build an interdisciplinary and synergistic framework for research, practice, and education that simultaneously safeguards the sustainable development of our living planet.

Was the rapid increase and collapse of commodity prices in 2007–2009 passed through to supermarket prices symmetrically? This study is the first to address this issue for an everyday-low-price (EDLP) supermarket chain, which infrequently changes its prices and rarely has sales. We also reexamine the question for typical firms that set a usual high price and have frequent sales. We examine 25 goods that use a primary commodity (such as rice in a bag of rice). We fail to reject symmetric adjustments for very few goods for both types of stores. In addition, we find that the probability an EDLP chain adjusts its prices in response to even a large commodity price shock is low for most goods.

We examine the introduction of automatic air pollution monitoring to counter suspected tampering at the local level, a central feature of China’s “war on pollution.” Exploiting 654 regression discontinuity designs based on city-level variation in the day that monitoring was automated, we find an immediate and lasting increase of 35 percent in reported PM10 concentrations post-automation. Moreover, automation’s introduction increased online searches for face masks and air filters, which are strong predictors of purchases. Overall, our findings suggest that the biased and imperfect information prior to automation led to suboptimal investments in defensive measures, plausibly imposing meaningful welfare costs. (JEL D82, O13, P28, Q53, Q55, Q58)

ABSTR A C T Police complicity in organized crime is not uncommon, yet it is extremely difficult to examine empiri-cally. Using unique sex transaction data from China, we show that police can be complicit in organized prostitution. Specifically, we document that sauna houses and massage parlors with greater neighbor-hood police density are likely to be "protected" by police and thus can host higher-risk, higher-penalty sex business. The complicity effect is particularly salient during periods of local prostitution crackdowns, implying selective enforcement. Changes in local leadership and visits of the central government's disci-pline teams can attenuate the complicity effect.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Subjective performance evaluation could induce influence activities: employees might devote too much effort to pleasing their evaluator, relative to working toward the goals of the organization itself. We conduct a randomized field experiment among Chinese local civil servants to study the existence and implications of influence activities. We find that civil servants do engage in evaluator-specific influence to affect evaluation outcomes, partly in the form of reallocating work efforts toward job tasks that are more important and observable to the evaluator. Importantly, we show that introducing uncertainty about the evaluator’s identity discourages evaluator-specific influence activities and improves bureaucratic work performance. (JEL D73, H83, J45, M54, O17, O18, P25)

Countries around the world have launched public disclosure programs to stimulate citizen participation in environmental governance, yet little is known about when such participation affects regulation and pollution. We conducted a national-scale field experiment that randomly varied how citizen appeals about violations of pollution standards were sent to regulators or the violating firms. We find that, appealing a firm’s violations to the regulator publicly through social media increased both regulatory oversight and firm compliance, which reduced subsequent violations by 60% and air and water pollution emissions by 12.4% and 3.8%, respectively. In contrast, appealing to the regulator through private channels only caused a marginal improvement in environmental outcomes. Additionally, we randomly varied the proportion of firms subject to appeals at the prefecture-level and find that pollution appeals filed against the treated firms are unlikely to crowd out local governments’ regulation of control firms . Analysis of ambient pollution data and back-of-the-envelope calculations both suggest that encouraging more public participation in environmental governance would lead to significant improvements in China’s aggregate environmental quality.

The effects of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) public health policies on non-COVID-19-related mortality are unclear. Here, using death registries based on 300 million Chinese people and a difference-in-differences design, we find that China's strict anti-contagion policies during the COVID-19 pandemic significantly reduced non-COVID-19 mortality outside Wuhan (by 4.6%). The health benefits persisted and became even greater after the measures were loosened: mortality was reduced by 12.5% in the medium term. Significant changes in people's behaviours (for example, wearing masks and practising social distancing) and reductions in air pollution and traffic accidents could have driven these results. We estimate that 54,000 lives could have been saved from non-COVID-19 causes during the 50 days of strict policies and 293,000 in the subsequent 115 days. The results suggest that virus countermeasures not only effectively controlled COVID-19 in China but also brought about unintended and substantial public health benefits.

The decade from 2010 to 2019 marked a significant turning point in China’s history of environmental regulation and pollution. This article describes the recent trends in air and water quality, with a focus on the five years since China declared a “war on pollution” in 2014. It summarizes the emerging literature that has taken advantage of accompanying improvements in data availability and accuracy to document sharp improvements in environmental quality, especially local air pollution, and understand their social, economic, and health consequences.

The decade from 2010 to 2019 marked a significant turning point in China’s history of environmental regulation and pollution. This article describes the recent trends in air and water quality, with a focus on the five years since China declared a “war on pollution” in 2014. It summarizes the emerging literature that has taken advantage of accompanying improvements in data availability and accuracy to document sharp improvements in environmental quality, especially local air pollution, and understand their social, economic, and health consequences. Michael Greenstone University of Chicago Department of Economics 1126 E. 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 and NBER mgreenst@uchicago.edu Guojun He Division of Social Science HKUST, Clear Water Bay Kowloon Hong Kong guojun.he@gmail.com Shanjun Li Cornell University 405 Warren Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 and NBER SL2448@cornell.edu Eric Zou Department of Economics University of Oregon 1415 Kincaid Street Eugene, OR 97403 and NBER ericzou@uoregon.edu

Accurately estimating the effect of air pollution on COVID-19 transmission requires researchers to account for the epidemiological characteristics, deal with endogeneity, and capture the dynamic impact of air pollution. To do so, we propose a new econometric framework by combining the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered-Deceased model, the Instrument Variable model, and the Flexible-Distributed-Lag model. Using data covering all Chinese cities, we find that a 10-point increase in the Air Quality Index would lead to a 2.80 percentage point increase in the daily COVID-19 growth rate with 2 to 13 days of delay, implying that improving air quality can help slow the COVID-19 spread.