The Key Cities for Air Pollution Control (KCAPC) program is one of China’s earliest and most important target-based environmental policies, launched in 2002 to address the country’s severe air pollution issue. However, the effectiveness of the program is still largely unexplored, as the...

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...

This study identifies the effect of environmental regulation on worker earnings using China’s “City Air Pollution Prevention and Control Program” (CAPPCP), which is a new city-level air quality, as a quasi-experiment. CAPPCP provides variations in regulatory intensity across years and...