Earlier studies that evaluated the impact of vehicular emissions on urban air quality often reached mixed conclusions, providing little guidance to city planners seeking solutions to the ever-growing problem of air pollution. In this paper, we combine the strengths of earlier studies with hourly-level data to reexamine the causal relationship between traffic congestion and ambient air quality in Beijing. We find that around 33% to 57% of ambient air pollution in Beijing can be attributed to vehicular emissions.

The high rates of economic activity and environmental degradation in Asia demand the implementation of creative and cost-effective environmental policy instruments that provide polluters with more flexibility to find least-cost solutions to pollution reduction. Despite their many theoretical advantages, the use of market-based instruments (MBIs) is a relatively recent phenomenon in Asia, partly due to policymakers being unfamiliar with MBIs and countries lacking the institutional capacity to implement and enforce them.

In this study, we show that changes in electricity prices in China have significant environmental consequences through its effect on industrial pollution emissions concentrations. To investigate this relationship, we pair a novel dataset of hourly smokestack-level pollutant emissions of industrial plants in Anhui, China with changes in hourly electricity prices. Using a difference-in-differences (DID) regression model, we find that pollution emissions from these plants have an inverse relationship with electricity prices.

There is an ongoing reform in coal taxation in China, from a quantity-based to a pricebased​ approach. While the coal tax could play an important role in resource conservation and air pollution reduction, its distributional effect is not well studied. This paper investigates the distributional effect of China’s coal taxes on households before and after the reform.

In this study, we examine institutional preferences, social preferences, and contribution in public goods games by conducting a lab-in-the-field experiment in rural China. Specifically, we examine whether people contribute differently depending on whether they are facing their preferred enforcement institution – punishment versus reward – and what factors are behind their institutional preferences.

Marine ecosystem services are in global decline which requires new transformational changes in governance to cope with multiple anthropogenic stressors. We review the biodiversity and ecosystem services outcomes of a governance transformation towards comanagement through the allocation of territorial user rights to artisanal fisher associations (TURFs). Through a systematic review we synthesize the implications of more than 25 years of establishing a TURFs policy over ecosystem services in Chile.

This paper examines the effects of extreme temperatures on mortality rates, using random year-to-year variation in temperature based on county-level panel data from China. The analysis finds a robust, U-shaped relationship between temperature and mortality rates, indicating that extremely cold or hot temperatures lead to excess deaths. The heat-related (cold-related) effect is 3.5 times (3.2 times) as large as previous findings that used U.S. data, and it is especially large for the elderly population, mainly due to excess deaths caused by cardiovascular diseases.

Nowadays, several Apps record real-time data from social networks that enrich users’ decision making. We argue that these data may also be used to better inform policy makers in the absence of monitoring data or as a complementary tool of measurement systems. This is the case of Waze, an App designed to facilitate access to information on real-time traffic conditions reported by users and based on navigation tools through Global Position System in smartphones.