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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (5 results)

  • Thesis
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2013)

This dissertation consists of three chapters that analyze the health effects of pollution in China. The first chapter investigates the effect of air pollution on cardiovascular mortality in the urban areas of China. The second chapter estimates the effect of water pollution on infant mortality. The third chapter studies the relationship between water pollution and cancer among the elderly.

The first chapter entitled "The Effect of Air Pollution on Cardiovascular Mortality: Evidences from the Beijing Olympic Games". I explore the exogenous air pollution variations induced by the 2008 Olympic Games to estimate the effects of air pollution on cardiovascular mortality in China. I use the regulation status during the Olympic Games as an instrument for air pollution. In the fixed-effects instrumental variable model, I find that air pollution has a robust and significant effect on cardiovascular mortality. In contrast, estimates from the conventional associational models are not robust. I estimate that decreasing current PM_10 concentration by 10% will save more than 67,000 lives (from cardiovascular diseases) in the urban areas in China each year.

China's surface water system has been severely polluted in the process of rapid industrialization. The second chapter investigates how this water pollution affects infant mortality. I find that surface water pollution has a significant, nonlinear effect on infant mortality. As surface water quality deteriorates, infant mortality first increases and then decreases. Moderate levels of pollution are the most dangerous. People's avoidance behavior may explain the results: as water becomes more polluted people reduce the consumption of surface water. The ordered-probit selection model is applied to estimate the effects, and precipitation and wastewater dumping are used as the instruments for surface water quality.

China also witnessed a dramatic increase in cancer rate in the past thirty years. In the third chapter, I investigate whether this high cancer rate is caused by water pollution. The difficulty in estimating the long-run health effects of pollution is that the lifetime exposure to pollution is hard to measure. However, China provides an ideal setting to estimate the long-run health effects of pollution because the Household Registration System (Hukou) effectively stopped people from migrating for many years. I focus on the elderly people (Age>60) because their mobility is extremely restricted by the System, so their life-time exposure to water pollution is more likely captured by the water quality data in recent years. I find that water pollution has large, significant, positive effects on all cancer mortality rate, digestive cancer mortality rate, urinary cancer mortality rate, liver and stomach cancer mortality rate. I also find that water pollution has no impact on cancer mortality rates for the younger adults (Age from 20-50), which may partially justify our argument that pollution exposure for the younger people cannot be accurately measured because they migrate.

    Cover page: Essays on the Health Effects of Pollution in China
    • Article
    Working Paper Series (2009)

    Auditing by a downstream firm of a Chinese supplier does not affect that the supplier’s blue-collar employees’ wages, probability of belonging to a union, or likelihood of working overtime. However, auditing makes it more likely that rural migrant workers receive pensions, business medical insurance, and unemployment insurance.

      Cover page: Does Customer Auditing Help Chinese Workers?
      • Article
      CEGA Working Papers (2020)
      Subjective performance evaluation is widely used by firms and governments toprovide work incentives. However, delegating evaluation power to local seniorleadership could induce influence activities: agents might devote much effortsto please their supervisors, rather than focusing on productive tasks that benefittheir organizations. We conduct a large-scale randomized field experimentamong Chinese local government employees and provide the first rigorousempirical evidence on the existence and implications of influence activities. Wefind that employees do engage in evaluator-specific influence to affectevaluation outcomes, and that this process can be partly observed by their coworkers.However, introducing uncertainty in the identity of the evaluatordiscourages evaluator-specific influence activities and significantly improves thework performance of local government employees.
        Cover page: Performance Evaluation, Influence Activities, and Bureaucratic Work Behavior: Evidence from China
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC Santa Barbara Previously Published Works (2024)
        We conducted a nationwide field experiment in China to evaluate the direct and indirect impacts of assigning firms to public or private citizen appeals when they violate pollution standards. There are three main findings. First, public appeals to the regulator through social media substantially reduce violations and pollution emissions, while private appeals cause more modest environmental improvements. Second, public appeals appear to tilt regulators’ focus away from facilitating economic growth and toward avoiding pollution-induced public unrest. Third, pollution reductions by treated firms are not offset by control firms, based on randomly varying the proportion of treated firms at the prefecture level.
          Cover page: Does the Squeaky Wheel Get More Grease? The Direct and Indirect Effects of Citizen Participation on Environmental Governance in ChinaCreative Commons 'BY-NC-ND' version 4.0 license
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC Santa Cruz Previously Published Works (2021)
          The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from 89 different studies. Hundreds of reports of unusual species observations from around the world suggest that animals quickly responded to the reductions in human presence. However, negative effects of lockdown on conservation also emerged, as confinement resulted in some park officials being unable to perform conservation, restoration and enforcement tasks, resulting in local increases in illegal activities such as hunting. Overall, there is a complex mixture of positive and negative effects of the pandemic lockdown on nature, all of which have the potential to lead to cascading responses which in turn impact wildlife and nature conservation. While the net effect of the lockdown will need to be assessed over years as data becomes available and persistent effects emerge, immediate responses were detected across the world. Thus, initial qualitative and quantitative data arising from this serendipitous global quasi-experimental perturbation highlights the dual role that humans play in threatening and protecting species and ecosystems. Pathways to favorably tilt this delicate balance include reducing impacts and increasing conservation effectiveness.
            Cover page: Global COVID-19 lockdown highlights humans as both threats and custodians of the environment
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