Population Mobility and Urban Air Quality: Causal Inference and Impact Measurement

Fu Huang, Qiang Wu and Pei Wang
Additional contact information
Fu Huang: Yangtze River Delta Economics and Social Development Research Center, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China
Pei Wang: Yangtze River Delta Economics and Social Development Research Center, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 15, 1-19

Abstract: This paper treats the lockdown of Hubei Province during the outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020 as a quasi-experiment, and uses the prefecture-level data of 328 cities in China to identify the causal effects of population mobility and urban air quality. This paper uses the DID model to eliminate the ‘Spring Festival effect’ with data from the same period of the lunar calendar in 2019 as the control group, and finds the reduction in population mobility has a clear causal impact on the improvement of urban air quality. The vast majority of air pollutants decreased, but ozone, which has a special generation mechanism, increased. This paper also constructs 29-day panel data of 328 prefecture-level cities from January to February in 2020 to quantitatively estimate the impact of population flow on urban air quality. After controlling for fixed effects, the results reveal that 1% increases in intra-city and inter-city population flows correspond to respective increases of 0.433% and 0.201% in the urban air quality index. Compared with inter-city flow, intra-city population flow increases air pollution more severely.

Keywords: population mobility; urban air quality; quasi-natural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/15/11591/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/15/11591/ (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:15:y:2023:i:15:p:11591-:d:1203771

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

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