 Escaping Air Pollution: Immigrants, Students, and Spillover Effects on Property Prices Abroad*Yuk Ying Chang and Sudipto Dasgupta Review of Finance, 2023, vol. 27, issue 5, 1699-1741 Abstract: We construct a time series of news coverage about air pollution in China for the period 1977–2019. Our measure of abnormal news coverage (ANC) of China’s air pollution is uncorrelated with growth in economic activity or cyclical components of such activity, but strongly correlated with weather-related and atmospheric conditions known to cause air pollution. ANC is associated with more capital flight from China. Focusing on the USA as a destination country, we find that ANC is associated with more Chinese citizens emigrating to US regions with stronger ethnic links to China, and more international students enrolling in US institutions with stronger Chinese student links. US regions with stronger ethnic or educational ties to China experience higher property price growth when ANC is higher. Our study suggests that perception of local environmental risk can have major consequences for the cross-border reallocation of capital and labor. Keywords: Air pollution; China’s air-pollution news; Emigration; Belief revision; Ethnicity; Educational links; Residential property prices (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:oup:revfin:v:27:y:2023:i:5:p:1699-1741. Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Review of Finance is currently edited by Marcin Kacperczyk More articles in Review of Finance from European Finance Association Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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