Exploring the relation between urbanization and residential CO2 emissions in China: a PTR approach

Recent empirical work suggests that urbanization and residential CO2 emissions are related. This paper investigates the nonlinear impact of urbanization on residential CO2 emissions over the period 1997–2011 in China by applying the Candelon et al. (2012) methodology. The results show that the relationship between urbanization and residential CO2 emissions is negative over the sample which is inconsistent with the previous studies. In addition, we find the absolute difference of the estimated coefficients in two regimes of urbanization is significant. Keywords: Panel threshold model, urbanization, residential CO2 emissions.