Transboundary pollution is a particularly serious problem as it leads people located at regional borders to disproportionately suffer from pollution. In China, where the environmental policy is decentralized and where environmental conflicts between provinces have occurred several times,...

In the present study, we investigate whether workers close to cities are paid higher non-agricultural wages than workers in outlying rural areas. We find that workers close to urban areas not only benefit from more opportunities to engage in non-agricultural activities, but also from better paid...

This paper assesses whether cities enhance technical efficiency of nearby rural counties, by allowing for heterogeneous urban effects both by regions and by city type. An empirical application is demonstrated using the Chinese county-level agricultural data from 2005 to 2009. Cities are found to...

This paper studies whether Chinese provinces set strategically their environmental stringency when faced with interprovincial competition for mobile capital. Using Chinese provincial data and spatial panel econometric models, we find that Chinese provinces do engage in this kind of strategic...

China’s actual fiscal decentralization is one-sided: while public expenditures are largely decentralized, fiscal revenues are recentralized after 1994. One critical consequence of the actual system is the creation of significant fiscal imbalances at sub-national level. This paper investigates...