Does Environmental Governance Specialization Reduce Air Pollution? Evidence from a Staggered Difference-in-Differences Approach in China

Lie Chen, Yongxi Yang () and Yiliang Tang ()
Additional contact information
Lie Chen: School of Law, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China
Yongxi Yang: School of Law, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China
Yiliang Tang: School of Law, Henan University, Kaifeng 475001, China

Sustainability, 2026, vol. 18, issue 11, 1-19

Abstract: Establishing specialized environmental adjudication divisions within China’s intermediate courts reduces local air pollution by approximately 3.9%. We examine this governance innovation using satellite-derived PM 2.5 data for 324 prefecture-level cities (2011–2023) and heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences methods that address biases in conventional estimators under staggered treatment adoption. Under city-level clustering, which reflects the unit of treatment assignment, four complementary estimators (Callaway–Sant’Anna, Sun–Abraham, Borusyak–Jaravel–Spiess, and two-way fixed effects) consistently yield negative and statistically significant treatment effects (ATT ranging from − 0.037 to − 0.054 , p < 0.05 ). With the more conservative province-level clustering (31 clusters), significance attenuates for all estimators, with p -values ranging from 0.078 to 0.289; we interpret this as reflecting the small number of clusters rather than the absence of a true effect, although sensitivity to the clustering level remains a limitation. Event study analysis confirms parallel pre-treatment trends and persistent post-treatment effects. Heterogeneity patterns are directionally consistent but statistically inconclusive ( n = 12 cohorts): reductions appear larger in more industrialized and more polluted cohorts, though the precise mechanism remains unidentified. A spatial analysis finds no evidence of pollution displacement, but SUTVA is violated by concurrent court adoption in neighboring cities; once the neighbor pool is restricted to never-treated cities, the apparent negative spillover attenuates to non-significance, so the direction of bias in our main estimates cannot be determined. These results demonstrate that governance specialization can meaningfully complement regulatory instruments in advancing sustainability goals for air quality.

Keywords: environmental governance; air pollution; PM 2.5; institutional design; staggered difference-in-differences; sustainability; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/18/11/5374/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/18/11/5374/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:18:y:2026:i:11:p:5374-:d:1952637

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Mr. Han Tan

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().