时间：2019年11月15日（周五）12:00-14:00

 

地点：艺园会议室

 

主讲人：刘梦迪（对外经济贸易大学国际经济贸易学院）

 

主持人：徐晋涛、王敏、黄卓、邢剑炜

 

摘要：Although there are purported benefits of governmental transparency for outcomes like environmental quality and service provision, the causal effects of governmental transparency have not been evaluated. Using a national-scale, randomized field experiment as a source of exogenous variation in transparency, we evaluate the downstream effects of transparency on regulatory outcomes related to pollution and environmental quality at both the firm level and the air quality monitoring station level. In this study, municipal governments in China are randomly assigned to treatment that involves the disclosure of a rating about their transparency in regulating pollution. The treatment increased the transparency of treated cities as compared to control cities. Using weekly firm-level pollution concentration data from China’s Nationwide Automatic Monitoring Network and station-level air quality data from the national air quality real-time release platform of Chinas Environmental Monitoring Station, we show that the increase in transparency caused reductions in nitrogen oxides concentration at both the firm level and the station level, while the increase in transparency impacted sulfur dioxide concentration only at the station level. One possible explanation is that as of the beginning of our experiment, China has achieved the target of reducing sulfur dioxide emissions in industrial enterprises, and the Chinese central government indicated that it would increase the regulation of nitrogen oxides. We provide strong evidence that increased transparency increases the stringency of regulation activities in China and thus close the “implementation gap” that has emerged between central policies and local implementation of those policies. The broader push toward transparency in governance could have far-reaching implications for the governmental provision of services and regulatory quality.