Local governments spend roughly $1.6 trillion per year to provide a variety of public services ranging from police and fire protection to public schools and public transit. However, we know little about public sector's productivity in delivering key services. To understand the productivity both...

This paper measures the impact of housing price changes on household consumption at the city level using the universe of credit and debit card transactions in China from 2011 to 2013. In sharp contrast to the literature on the U.S. housing market, our analysis shows a large and negative housing...

Severe traffic congestion is ubiquitous in large urban centers, especially those in middle-income countries and emerging markets. Using road pricing as the first-best policy to address congestion has been drawing increased attention from policy makers. This paper provides the first causal...

The automobile market in China has seen unprecedented expansion during the past decade with rapid model turnover and dramatic price decline. This paper aims to document the evolution of price and investigate the sources of price decline, paying attention to both market structure and cost...

The increasing market share of light trucks in the U.S. in recent years has been characterized as an “arms race” where individual purchase of light trucks for better self-protection in collisions nevertheless leads to worse traffic safety for the society. This paper investigates the...

Although entry regulation is ubiquitous across countries, comprehensive evaluations on the broad impacts of such regulations on firm dynamics and productivity are lacking. We address the key identification challenge of policy endogeneity by leveraging the staggered implementation of a pilot...

The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme is the first international cap-and-trade program for CO2 and the largest carbon pricing regime in the world. A principle concern over the Emissions Trading Scheme is the potential impact on the competitiveness of industry. Using a panel of 5873 firms...

During 2013-2014, China launched a nationwide, real-time air quality monitoring and disclosure program, a watershed moment in the history of its environmental regulations. We present the first empirical analysis of this natural experiment by exploiting its staggered implementation across cities....

The emissions reductions from the adoption of a new transportation technology depend on the emissions from the new technology relative to those from the displaced technology. We evaluate the emissions reductions from electric vehicles (EVs) by identifying which vehicles would have been purchased...