Reexamining the Empirical Evidence for an Environmental Kuznets Curve

William Harbaugh (), Arik Levinson () and David Wilson

No 7711, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper uses an updated and revised panel data set on ambient air pollution in cities world-wide to examine the robustness of the evidence for the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between national income and pollution. We test the sensitivity of the pollution-income relationship to functional forms, to additional covariates, and to changes in the nations, cities, and years sampled. We find that the results are highly sensitive to these changes. We conclude that there is little empirical support for an inverted-U-shaped relationship between several important air pollutants and national income in these data.

JEL-codes: Q25 O13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev, nep-ene and nep-env
Date: Written 2000-05
Note: PE
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Related works:
Working Paper: Reexamining the Empirical Evidence for an Environmental Kuznets Curve (2000)
Journal Article: Reexamining The Empirical Evidence For An Environmental Kuznets Curve (2002)
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