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...

China implemented the environmental cadre evaluation (ECE) policy at the end of 2005, elevating environmental priority to the top tier in the cadre evaluation system. This paper theoretically and empirically examines the labor market effect of the ECE policy in China, with a focus on...

The labor market effects of environmental regulations in emerging economies are largely unexplored. This paper examines whether and how employment and sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions are affected by the environmental cadre evaluation (ECE) policy in China. Our theoretical analyses suggest that...

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...