Pollution control, worker productivity, and wage inequality

Pengqing Zhang ()
Additional contact information
Pengqing Zhang: Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

The Annals of Regional Science, 2024, vol. 72, issue 4, No 3, 1105-1128

Abstract: Abstract Poor environmental quality can reduce worker productivity, but how this effect is associated with skilled-unskilled wage inequality is still unclear. This paper studies how stricter pollution control impacts wage inequality in the presence of such a worker productivity effect by establishing general equilibrium models with two urban sectors and by conducting empirical analysis with country-level panel data. The models show that when the non-polluting sector is under perfect competition, wage inequality is closely related to the worker productivity effect, while when it is under monopolistic competition, productivity gains of skilled workers from stricter pollution control exhibit complete pass-through. Empirical analysis suggests that the worker productivity effect of pollution control is unskill-biased, which helps mitigate inequality.

JEL-codes: J24 J31 Q52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00168-023-01237-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:anresc:v:72:y:2024:i:4:d:10.1007_s00168-023-01237-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://link.springer.com/journal/168

DOI: 10.1007/s00168-023-01237-y

Access Statistics for this article

The Annals of Regional Science is currently edited by Martin Andersson, E. Kim and Janet E. Kohlhase

More articles in The Annals of Regional Science from Springer, Western Regional Science Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().