 Incentives, penalties, and rural air pollution: Evidence from satellite dataYongwei Nian Journal of Development Economics, 2023, vol. 161, issue C Abstract: I test the role of economic incentives and command and control in reducing agricultural fires, a major source of air pollution in most rural regions across the world caused by burning crop residues after harvest. To tackle data shortage, I use high-resolution satellite data to construct a fine measure of agricultural fires as well as other geographic characteristics at 1 km × 1 km resolution for China. Using the staggered arrival of biomass power plants, which purchase crop residues as production inputs from nearby areas, as a shock to economic incentives, I find a more than 30% drop in agricultural fires in the vicinity of a plant after its opening relative to areas farther away. Such drop cannot be explained by structural transformation, migration, or enhanced regulation near the plant, and is consistent with an incentive-based explanation. I then examine the effectiveness of a command and control policy that bans agricultural fires within 15 km of airports. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, I find no evidence that such policy works. Keywords: Agricultural fires; Environmental policies; China (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:161:y:2023:i:c:s0304387823000044 DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2023.103049 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier |
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