Conference Agenda

Transportation is one of the main sources of GHG and pollution emissions worldwide, and recent studies have shown that the majority of automobile pollution comes from vehicles older than 10 years. Notwithstanding, existing policies create incentives against removing older vehicles from the fleet with potential pollution and public health impacts. This paper examines the impacts of an anti-scrappage policy in Brazil using a border-pair approach that leverages state variation in exemption ages for the vehicle ownership tax. Using municipality-level vehicle registration data from 2013-2020, we find that low-age exemption cutoffs can increase fleet age up to 1 year. Using fleetbased estimates and satellite-level data on global and local pollutants, we find that low exemption age policies are associated with up to 23% higher on-road CO2 emissions per capita and 4% higher concentrations of PM2.5. Meanwhile, the rate of low birth weight measured from administrative birth records increases by 9.6% under a 10-year exemption policy and 2.5% in localities with exemption cutoff between 15 and 20 years. Despite the underscored social costs of these policies, we find suggestive evidence that electoral incentives make low-age exemptions politically costly to be overturned.

In 2013 China launched a campaign against ambient fine particle (PM2.5) air pollution, spearheaded by the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan (APPCAP). This paper presents estimates of the reductions in PM2.5 exposure achieved by this campaign, as well as the resulting health benefits. Using panel data covering 239 countries and territories from 2000 to 2019, paired with a quasi-experimental approach based on a synthetic counterfactual, I find that the campaign launched in 2013 reduced PM2.5 exposure of the average Chinese resident in 2019 by over 20%. While there are air quality improvements in all provinces, some of the largest effects appear in Central and Eastern China. Following the Global Burden of Disease methodology, the air quality campaign reduced annual PM2.5-related deaths by between 220 and 280 thousand depending on estimation strategy. Monetizing the mortality reductions with recent values of statistical life suggests total benefits of up to 1 trillion Renminbi or 1% of Gross Domestic Product.

Environmental inequalities, such as unequal exposure to pollution and climate risks, persist across racial and socioeconomic groups in the United States. This paper re-examines the role of the Residential Security Maps created by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the 1930s, which graded neighborhoods according to perceived mortgage risk and have been widely linked to long-run racial segregation and environmental disadvantage. A common view holds that these maps not only reinforced residential segregation but also directly shaped the spatial distribution of environmental hazards, including air pollution, flood risk, and extreme heat.

We evaluate this claim using a causal framework that combines machine-learning predictions of counterfactual HOLC grades in unmapped cities with a spatial difference-in-differences design. Our results confirm that the maps modestly increased racial sorting and segregation, consistent with prior work. However, we find no evidence that HOLC mapping independently affected the siting of environmental or climatic hazards. Differences in air pollution, flood risk, heat exposure, and mortality across historical grades are quantitatively similar in mapped and unmapped cities.

These findings suggest that contemporary environmental inequalities primarily reflect residential sorting and discriminatory practices that operated broadly across U.S. cities, rather than an additional siting effect uniquely induced by the HOLC maps, which we do not detect.

To address congestion and air pollution, many megacities in China use lotteries and auctions to allocate vehicle licenses, making people wait several years for a license. Recently, to promote electric vehicles (EVs), some cities introduced a separate system for EV licenses with significantly shorter expected wait times. This paper estimates a structural model to quantify the impact of giving preferential treatment to EVs in the vehicle license allocation and its welfare effects. The implicit cost of waiting for a vehicle license is estimated to be about 10 percent of the vehicle price. The shorter wait times for EV licenses have led to a considerable increase in EV sales. Moreover, vehicle ownership restrictions engendered a consumer welfare loss of 26-52 billion Yuan in Beijing and Shanghai from 2013 to 2017, of which about 10 percent was due to the waiting cost. However, vehicle ownership restrictions also reduced automobile externalities, offsetting more than 80 percent of the consumer welfare loss.