We study how centralized control over local bureaucratic agencies helps alleviate the enforcement problem of environment protection policies in China, exploiting a reform that empowers upper-level environmental protection bureaus to administrate lower-level bureaus vertically through personnel...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of China's policy in 2017 to ban waste imports on air pollution. We exploit the difference-in-differences strategy, which combines the time variation and the cross-prefecture variation in the waste import before the policy change. We find that prefectures...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of China's policy in 2017 to ban waste imports on air pollution. We exploit the difference-in-differences strategy, which combines the time variation and the cross-prefecture variation in the waste import before the policy change. We find that prefectures...

This paper studies how centralizing environmental administration affected air pollution in China. China launched a vertical administration reform in 2016 to empower upper-level Environmental Protection Bureaus to administer lower-level bureaus vertically through personnel control. Exploiting a...

This paper's findings suggest that an arbitrary Chinese policy that greatly increases total suspended particulates (TSP) air pollution is causing the 500 million residents of Northern China to lose more than 2.5 billion life years of life expectancy. The quasi-experimental empirical approach is...