Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0003-4387-6520

Date of Award

Summer 7-31-2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Economics

First Advisor

Garth Heutel

Second Advisor

Stefano Carattini

Third Advisor

James Marton

Fourth Advisor

Yanjun Liao

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter investigates the impact of air quality changes on people's environmental awareness and beliefs which are measured by Google search interests related to air quality and the donation amounts to the Democratic and Republican parties. The increase in air pollutant indicators may influence the public's environmental attention and re-evaluate the incumbent politician's environmental position. I use the fixed effects OLS model and Instrumental Variable method to estimate the effect of air quality change on Google search interests on air quality-related terms and the contribution amount to Democrats and Republicans. Firstly, I find that Google search interests for “air quality”, “air pollution” and “environmental protection” increase by 0.0858 which is 0.3% of the mean search interests, when the average AQI increases by one unit in a month which means people pay more attention to air quality when they experienced worse air quality. People are more likely to have stronger reactions to prolonged changes in air quality compared to temporary deteriorations. Secondly, the poor air quality will lead people to increase their contribution amounts to Democrats while decrease for Republicans. It suggests that bad air quality carries a moderate electoral penalty for anti-environment incumbents as most of the Republicans are more anti-environment compared with Democrats.

In the second chapter, I investigate the benefits of the lockdown policy implemented in response to the emergence of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China in December 2019. The Chinese government enforced strict lockdown measures to contain the spread of the virus, which resulted in economic losses but potentially led to improvements in air quality. Using the Staggered DID model, I examine the impact of the lockdown and its subsequent lifting on air quality outcomes. I use lockdown cities as the treatment group and the non-lockdown cities as the control group. The results reveal that in the cities under lockdown, both the AQI and levels showed significant improvement, with reductions of 6.610 and 2.788 respectively, compared to the control cities. Additionally, a daily decrease of 0.239 in AQI and 0.110 in was observed from the implementation of the lockdown policy until March 14th, 2020, in the lockdown cities. To ensure the robustness of the findings and rule out the possibility of systematic differences between treatment and control cities, I conduct an event study analysis. The results indicate that both the treatment and control groups exhibited a parallel trend in air quality prior to the implementation of the lockdown, further strengthening the validity of the results.

The third essay studies the impact of piloted carbon market transactions on air quality and mental health. The air pollution caused by the development of the economy has caused huge losses in human and financial costs. Much literature is concerned about the impact of air quality on heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, and other health effects, but less attention is paid to mental health. China's carbon trading market pilots and the national carbon market provide ideal quasi-experiments. In this study, I utilize the DID method to estimate the effects of the ETS on air quality and mental health. The pilot province Fujian Province was treated as the treatment group, and the remaining provinces that never implemented carbon marketing policy in 2013 and 2016, served as the control group. The results reveal a significant improvement in air quality following the implementation of ETS, as indicated by a decrease in AQI by 10.98 units, by 7.92 , and by 13.23 . Furthermore, the analysis shows that CESD20 score of individuals in Fujian Province experienced a decrease of 3.7% after the pilot of ETS, indicating a positive impact on mental well-being.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/37421680

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