The Effect of Air Pollution on Migration: Evidence from China

Chen, Shuai; Oliva, Paulina; Zhang, Peng

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3451332

Cited by 43 publications

(74 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…To ensure that our instrument meets the exclusion restriction criteria, we control for flexible weather variables so that thermal inversions affect body weight only through air pollution. Thermal inversions have been used as IV for air pollution in several studies, including Hicks et al (2015), Arceo et al, (2016), Chen et al (2017), Fu et al, (2017), Chen et al (2018), and Jans et al (2018).…”

Section: Empirical Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…further average to the 12-month exposure window. This dataset has been used in previous studies (Chen et al, 2017;Fu et al, 2017), and validated with ground-based pollution data in China (Chen et al, 2017). We do not use ground-based pollution data mainly because they are only available after 2000 and covered only a few cities.…”

Section: Air Pollutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One concern is that pollution may induce people to move (Chen et al, 2017) and thus bias our estimates. Note that the individual fixed effects should absorb all initial sorting into difference places, including sorting based on differential pollution levels.…”

Section: Summary Statisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The effect of air pollution on body weight and obesity: Evidence from China

Deschênes

Wang

et al. 2020

Journal of Development Economics

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169

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte.We provide the first study estimating the causal effect of air pollution on body weight.Using the China Health and Nutrition Survey, which provides detailed longitudinal health and socioeconomic information for 13,226 adult individuals over 1989-2011, we find significant positive effects of air pollution, instrumented by thermal inversions, on body mass index (BMI). Specifically, a 1 μg/m3 (1.59%) increase in average PM2.5 concentrations in the past 12 months increases BMI by 0.31%, and further increases the overweight and obesity rates by 0.89 and 0.19 percentage points, respectively. Our paper identifies a new cause of obesity, and sheds new light on the morbidity cost of air pollution. JEL Classification:I12, I15, Q53

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Section: Empirical Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Air Pollutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The effect of air pollution on body weight and obesity: Evidence from China

Deschênes

Wang

et al. 2020

Journal of Development Economics

Self Cite

169

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“…Bayer et al (2009) used a hedonic method to estimate the effect of clean air as an amenity, and found that air quality could influence long-term migration. At the sub-national level, degradation of air quality from 1996 to 2010 has significantly decreased migration inflows in Chinese counties (Chen et al 2017). However, few studies have discussed the impact of air quality on short-term population mobility, especially in developing countries such as China where air pollution tends to be more severe.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Escaping from pollution: the effect of air quality on inter-city population mobility in China

Cui

Wang

et al. 2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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China faces severe air pollution issues due to the rapid growth of the economy, causing concerns for human physical and mental health as well as behavioral changes. Such adverse impacts can be mediated by individual avoidance behaviors such as traveling from polluted cities to cleaner ones. This study utilizes smartphone-based location data and instrumental variable regression to try and find out how air quality affects population mobility. Our results confirm that air quality does affect the population outflows of cities. An increase of 100 points in the air quality index will cause a 49.60% increase in population outflow, and a rise of 1 μg m −3 in PM 2.5 may cause a 0.47% rise in population outflow. Air pollution incidents can drive people to leave their cities 3 days or a week later by railway or road. The effect is heterogeneous among workdays, weekends and holidays. Our results imply that air quality management can be critical for urban tourism and environmental competitiveness.

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“…As will be discussed in Section 2, studies show that one of the main adverse impacts of a deteriorating environment is the impediment of labor flow. Poor environmental amenity quality could deter professional workers from migrating to a city [7], and is also associated with a city's emigration rate [8][9][10]. Such pull and push forces could together induce a substantial loss of human capital for the economy with deteriorating environmental quality.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimal Environmental Tax Rate in an Open Economy with Labor Migration—An E-DSGE Model Approach

Chan

2019

Sustainability

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Recent research has started to apply environmental dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (E-DSGE) models for climate policy analysis. However, all of the studies assume a closed economy setting, where there is no interaction of the economy with an outside economy; this paper fills the gap by constructing a two-city E-DSGE model that features labor migration. With the model, we solve for the optimal environmental tax rate determined by a Ramsey social planner, who maximizes household utility and takes into account the policy’s impact on labor migration. We find the following. (i) The optimal environmental tax rate should be more volatile and procyclical than the rates predicted in the aforementioned literature. (ii) In the closed economy setting, a higher environmental tax rate would always dampen production, while in our setting, it could stimulate output through deterring labor outflow and attracting labor inflow. (iii) We complement the existing literature by emphasizing that the optimal environmental tax rate in a city should respond not only to the shocks that occur internally, but also to those that occur in the opponent city. In particular, we find that it is optimal to reduce the environmental tax rate if a positive total factor productivity (TFP) shock occurs in the neighbor city.

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The Effect of Air Pollution on Migration: Evidence from China

Cited by 43 publications

References 39 publications

The effect of air pollution on body weight and obesity: Evidence from China

The effect of air pollution on body weight and obesity: Evidence from China

Escaping from pollution: the effect of air quality on inter-city population mobility in China

Optimal Environmental Tax Rate in an Open Economy with Labor Migration—An E-DSGE Model Approach

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