Two competing hypotheses, value enhancing and value discounting, state that implementing socially responsible corporate policies can have positive or negative effects on firm value. This paper tests how a specific type of social responsibility–corporate equality–affects firm value. Corporate...

Existing studies in finance have documented the comovement of stock returns of companies headquartered in the same location. The interpretation is that local investors have a “local bias” due to an information advantage on local companies. This paper argues that localized agglomeration...

The correlation between wage premia and concentrations of firm activity may arise due to agglomeration economies or workers sorting by unobserved productivity. A worker's residential location is used as a proxy for their unobservable productivity attributes in order to test whether estimated...

The economic costs of trans-boundary pollution spillovers versus local effects is a necessary input in evaluating centralized versus decentralized environmental policies. Directly estimating these for air pollution is difficult because spillovers are high-frequency and vary with distance while...

This paper studies how industry specialization, diversification, and churning affect unemployment rates in Chinese cities. Using a city level panel data set from 1997 to 2006, we find that the specialization of wholesale and retail industry can significantly decrease unemployment rate; however,...

Three urban growth theories predict parallel growth of cities. The endogenous growth theory predicts deterministic parallel growth; the random growth theory implies that city growth follows Gibrat’s law with a steady-state distribution; and the hybrid growth theory suggests the co-movement of...

We evaluate the environmental and economic effects of Beijing’s driving restrictions. Based on daily data from multiple monitoring stations, air pollution falls 19% during every-other-day and 8% during one-day-per-week restrictions. Based on hourly viewership data, the number of television...

The Rosen-Roback spatial equilibrium theory states that cross-city variations in wages and housing prices reflect urban residents’ willingness to pay for urban amenities or quality of life. This paper is the first to quantify and rank the quality of life in Chinese cities based on the...

We provide nationwide estimates of air pollution’s effect on short-run labor productivity for manufacturing firms in China from 1998 to 2007. An emerging literature estimates air pollution’s effects on labor productivity but only for small groups of workers of particular occupations or...

Using a sample of over 0.3 million marathon runners in 37 cities and 55 races in China in 2014 and 2015, we estimate the air pollution elasticity of finish time to be 0.041. Our causal identification comes from the exogeneity of air pollution on the race day because runners are required to...