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...

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...

This paper draws on a natural experiment generated by the Key Tax Source (KTS) supervision in China to evaluate the impact of strengthening tax administration on firm's emission behavior. Using a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design, we find that KTS supervision by State Administration of...

The Minimum Livelihood Guarantee (MLG) system is functioned as the last resort safety net for China's urban poor people and plays a substantial role in poverty reduction. Over the past few years, reforms have been taken to increase the benefit levels and to provide minimum income protection for...

This study constructs a competitive school district housing market model, ascertains the impact of reform in public school assignment rules on families’ school choice behavior, and investigates the impact of a multi-school dicing reform conducted in Beijing’s Haidian District in April 2018....

Information quality affects matching and marital outcomes. We show in a simple two-dimensional matching model that a noisier cue for one trait leads to a shift in sorting tradeoff toward the other, lowers average welfare but the impact is asymmetric. To test the predictions, we explore the...

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 examines the impact of COVID‐19 lockdowns on exports by Chinese cities. We use city‐level export data at a monthly frequency from January 2018 through April 2020. Differences‐in‐differences estimates suggest cities in lockdown experienced a ceteris paribus 34 percentage points...