Over the last thirty years, even as China's economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the environmental quality of its urban centers has precipitously declined due to heavy industrial output and coal consumption. The country is currently the world's largest greenhouse-gas emitter and several of the...

China's extremely high levels of urban air, water and greenhouse gas emission levels pose local and global environmental challenges. China's urban leaders have substantial influence and discretion over the evolution of economic activity that generates such externalities. This paper examines the...

Megacity growth in the developing world is fueled by a desire to access their large local labor markets. Growing megacities suffer from high levels of traffic congestion and pollution, which degrade local quality of life. Transportation technology that allows individuals to access the megacity...

China's government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to invest in new industrial parks with the intent of boosting the productivity of new firms attracted to the parks and to generate spillovers for the local economy in order to accelerate economic growth. Do such place based investments...

The quality of governance depends on public sector worker productivity. We use micro data from China to document that judges are less productive on polluted days. Building on the insights of Alchian and Kessel (1962), we discuss the role of organization design and the incentives of public versus...

At political boundaries, local leaders often have weak incentives to reduce polluting activity because the social costs are borne by downstream neighbors. This paper exploits a natural experiment set in China in which the central government changed the local political promotion criteria and...

This paper is a comment on "Incentives and Outcomes: China's Environmental Policy" by Jing Wu, Yongheng Deng, Jun Huang, Randall Morck, and Bernard Yeung which can be found at: "http://ssrn.com/abstract=2399048" http://ssrn.com/abstract=2399048

China's extremely high levels of urban air, water and greenhouse gas emissions levels pose local and global environmental challenges. China's urban leaders have substantial influence and discretion over the evolution of economic activity that generates such externalities. This paper examines the...

Over the last 30 years, the Chinese government has invested in new industrial parks with the intent of stimulating urban economic growth. The central government delegates the site selection decision to provincial leaders. A principal-agent issue arises because the central government prioritizes...

Over the last thirty years, China's major cities have experienced significant income and population growth. Much of this growth has been fueled by urban production spurred by world demand. Using a unique cross-city panel data set, we test several hypotheses concerning the relationship between...