The Productivity Consequences of Pollution-Induced Migration in China

时间：6月9日（周三）晚上8：00-9：30

地点：（线上进行）

腾讯会议 ID：669 214 656

主讲人：Ran Song (Yale-NUS College, National University of Singapore)

摘要：Migration and pollution are two defining features of China’s impressive growth performance over the last 30 years. In this paper we study how pollution-induced migration affects productivity and welfare across Chinese cities. We document a robust pattern in which skilled workers emigrate more in response to pollution than the unskilled. Their greater sensitivity to air quality holds up in cross-sectional variation across cities, panel variation with individual fixed-effects, and when instrumenting for pollution using distant power-plants upwind of cities, or thermal inversions that trap pollution. Pollution therefore changes the spatial distribution of skilled and unskilled workers, which results in higher returns to skill in cities that the educated migrate away from. We quantify the loss in aggregate productivity due to this re-sorting by estimating a model of demand and supply of skilled and unskilled workers across Chinese cities. Counterfactual simulations from the estimated model show that reducing pollution would increase productivity through spatial re-sorting by approximately as much as the direct health benefits of clean air. Physical and institutional restrictions on mobility exacerbate welfare losses. People’s dislike of pollution explains a substantial portion of the wage gap between cities.

主讲人介绍：Ran Song is an assistant professor of economics at Yale-NUS College, National University of Singapore. Before joining Yale-NUS, he was a postdoctoral associate at Yale University and Harvard University, and a visiting scholar at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His primary research fields are environmental economics and labor economics.