Using a unique county-level panel on single-season paddy rice yield and daily weather outcomes from 1996 to 2009, we examined the impacts of weather variations on paddy rice yield in China.

Congestion plays a central role in urban and transportation economics. Existing estimates of congestion costs rely on stated or revealed preferences studies. We explore a complementary measure of congestion costs based on self-reported happiness. Exploiting quasi-random variation in daily congestion in Beijing that arises because of superstitions about the number four, we estimate a strong effect of daily congestion on self-reported happiness.

Abstract: In this paper, we examine the relative influence of individual decisions on joint household decisions, and whether and to what extent joint choices are more or less patient than individual choices in households. We find that both spouses have a significant influence on joint decisions, whereas husbands on average have a stronger influence than wives. Moreover, we find a substantial share of choice shifts from individual to joint household decisions, i.e. joint decisions are either more patient or more impatient than both individual choices.

This paper develops a stochastic dynamic programming model to investigate a type of dynamic
enforcement strategy where the penalties for violations of environmental regulations are based on not only the current level of violations but also the firms’ past noncompliance records. The results show that firms’ optimal level of noncompliance would be a decreasing function of their accumulated

Employing hourly data records from 2013 and 2014 in Beijing, we investigate the causal effects of vehicle traffic on air pollution. An arguably exogenous variation in vehicle use that results from the staggered and rotating driving restriction program there, combined with a widespread Chinese superstition about the unlucky number four, allows us to better track causal effects of traffic-induced air pollutants in a generalized 2SLS framework.

We pair a county-level panel of annual industrial output with a fine-scale daily weather dataset to  estimate the responses of industrial output to temperature changes in China. We have three primary findings. First, industrial output is nonlinear in temperature changes. With seasonal average temperatures as temperature variables, industrial output increases by 0.7–1.0% for each 1°C increase in average spring temperature, and falls by 1.3–2.3% for each 1°C increase in average summer temperature.

This paper uses data from 2009 to 2014 to study the short- to medium-run effect of a driving restriction on transportation patterns in Beijing. The driving restriction specifies two numbers for each weekday so that cars with license plates ending in either of the numbers are banned from driving on that date. Because very few Chinese want to have their car licenses ending in 4, many more cars are driving on days when 4 is banned.

Outdated capacity and substantial potential for energy conservation are the two main features of energy-intensive sectors in developing countries. Such countries also seek to implement market-based options to further control domestic carbon emissions as well as to promote the withdrawal of outdated capacity and upgrade production levels. This paper presents a quantitative assessment of an emission trading scheme (ETS) for China’s iron and steel industry. The diverse array of normal and outdated capacities are modeled in a two-country, three-good partial equilibrium model.