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...

Almond et al., published in the American Economic Review in 2009, spurred an influential literature that exploits quasi-experimental spatial variation in atmospheric emissions associated with winter heating policies in the world’s most populous nation, China. Our study takes advantage of an...