Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Daily Overview |
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Water Pollution Location: B129 Session Chair: Laura Grant, Claremont McKenna College | |
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Bureaucratic Incentives and Environmental Regulation: Evidence from the Yangtze River 1: Nanjing University; 2: Tufts University What role do incentives play in the performance of bureaucrats? This paper estimates the effect of promotion incentives for bureaucrats in reducing water pollution in the Yangtze river in China, using a regression discontinuity design. The RD approach exploits the age threshold implicit in China’s bureaucratic promotion system where promotion prospects dwindle sharply after the age of 56.5 years. Since 2017, environmental performance was explicitly added as a criteria in promotion decisions of mayors and party secretaries. We find that polluting firms in cities governed by younger bureaucrats emit 3% less pollution than those governed by bureaucrats older than 56.5 years. This young–old pollution gap exists only in polluting industries, not in nonpolluting ones, and it emerges only after 2017, when the policy was implemented. Using firm level pollution data, we find that younger bureaucrats with stronger promotion incentives tighten water regulation by increasing inspections of polluting firms and promoting the entry of cleaner firms. Linking promotion incentives with housing values, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that strong bureaucratic incentives related to protecting the Yangtze River are associated with an economic benefit of approximately 3.9 trillion CNY (550 billion USD). | |