讲座题目：Evaluating Air Pollution Regulation: Separating Firm Competitiveness and Ambient Effects

主 讲 人：香港中文大学（深圳） 张鹏 副教授

讲座时间：2024年3月19日（周二）10：00

讲座地点：商学院江湾楼 336 晨星厅

主办单位：中南大学商学院数据科学与交叉学科系

主 持 人：中南大学商学院 汪阳洁 教授

摘  要：Measuring environmental regulation’s effect on firm competitiveness is central to designing optimal policies. Existing studies document significant negative effects of air pollution regulations on manufacturing competitiveness as measured by total factor productivity (TFP). A separate literature finds that air pollution lowers TFP through its ambient effect on workers’ physical and mental health and cognition. Extant empirical measures reflect some combination of the competitiveness and ambient effects and only under specific circumstances will they reflect the average policy effect across all firms. We develop a boundary-discontinuity-difference-in-differences approach to isolate the competitiveness effect: both regulated and unregulated firms adjacent to each other enjoy the ambient effect via spillovers but only regulated firms suffer the competitiveness effect. We apply the approach to a major air pollution regulation in China. The traditional approach to estimating the regulation’s effect yields a 3.75% TFP decline and net policy cost of USD 21.2 billion. The true competitiveness effect is 6.40% implying an ambient effect of 2.65% among regulated firms. The true cost of the policy is lower (about USD 10.4 billion) because proximate non-regulated firms also enjoy the ambient effect.

主讲人简介:

张鹏，香港中文大学（深圳）经管学院经济学长聘副教授，发展经济学顶级期刊Journal of Development Economics副主编，SSCI权威期刊China Economic Review副主编，广东省杰出青年基金获得者。张鹏博士研究方向为环境经济学、发展经济学、劳动经济学和健康经济学。论文发表在Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, The Economic Journal，Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Development Economics（6篇）和Journal of Environmental Economics and Management（3篇）等经济学期刊及Nature Sustainability等科学类期刊。他于2016年6月获得美国加州大学圣芭芭拉分校(University of California, Santa Barbara)经济学博士学位，并于2016-2020担任香港理工大学经济学助理教授。