We investigate the cost and benefit of one of the most stringent Chinese environmental regulations that led to a shutdown of a large number of livestock farms. The temporal and spatial variation in programme implementation allows us to employ a staggered difference-in-difference (DID) to identify the causal effects of the regulation. Our DID estimates show that while the regulation significantly reduced NH3-N, it has no significant effect on the other three important livestock related pollutants (pH, DO and COD).

To cope with the stricter environmental regulation, manufacturing firms need to carry out pollution reduction activities and change their optimal production decisions, which may affect their labor demand.

Significance

Are COVID-19 spread and mortality related to different countries’ government mobility restriction policies, democratic institutions, and cultural norms? Leveraging data from 140 countries, we find that policy, institutions, and vulnerabilities interact to determine pandemic spread and mortality. A delay in restricting international mobility increases pandemic mortality. Combining vulnerabilities with a delay in domestic mobility restrictions increases mortality.

Since 2006, China has experienced an unprecedented expansion of its wind and solar power generation capacity and associated manufacturing industries. This rapid growth was supported by large subsidies that resulted in a significant and increasing government subsidy debt to renewable investors as well as a high curtailment rate for renewable electricity. This article reviews China’s renewable electricity development and policies between 2006 and 2020.

Based on a county-level monthly panel data from four provinces and a province-level monthly panel data from 21 provinces from 2009 to 2015, we use the regression discontinuity method to examine the impacts of the tired pricing reform implemented in July 2012 on residential electricity use in China. The county-level (province-level) estimation shows that the tiered pricing reform has reduced the monthly electricity use per household by 6.5 ​kWh (8.9 ​kWh), accounting for 6.1% (7.1%) of the monthly electricity use per household.

This paper uses data from an employee tracking survey in China for about 6000 incumbent workers to document their dynamic labor market outcomes throughout the year 2020. I find that the employment situation worsened sharply during the lockdown period and then recovered gradually, showing a “V” shaped pattern. However, by the end of November 2020, about 4.4 per cent of 2019 incumbent workers were still unemployed, with few social protections.

The emissions reductions from the adoption of a new transportation technology depend on the emissions from the new technology relative to those from the displaced technology. We evaluate the emissions reductions from electric vehicles (EVs) by identifying which vehicles would have been purchased had EVs not been available. We do so by estimating a random coefficients discrete choice model of new vehicle demand and simulating counterfactual sales with EVs no longer subsidized or removed from the new vehicle market.