Gaming in Air Pollution Data? Lessons from China

By Yuyu Chen, Ginger Zhe Jin, Naresh Kumar, G. Shi. 2012

202 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dee024ad669a33abd8a32138cffad3d700624f11

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Liguo Lin
2. P. Barwick
3. Yu Qin
4. Pei Li
5. Shuyu Xue
6. Y. Chen
7. Xin Zhang
8. Bohui Zhang

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

1. Yu Qin
2. Xin Zhang
3. Shanjun Li
4. Xiaobo Zhang
5. Xi Chen
6. Jiaqi Liang
7. Hongjia Zhu
8. L. Langbein

Citations in the corpus

• Happiness in the Air: How Does a Dirty Sky Affect Mental Health and Subjective Well-being? (2017, methodology): “11 If the government indeed manipulates the API data when air quality is extremely bad as suggested by Chen et al. (2012) and Ghanem and Zhang (2014), using the official API data tends to underestimate the true impact of air pollution.”
• Can Technology Solve the Principal-Agent Problem? Evidence from China’s War on Air Pollution (2020, unknown): “In particular, Chen et al. (2012) and Ghanem and Zhang (2014) document the unsmoothness in the distribution of air quality data and reveal that the data are manipulated at a critical threshold (Air Pollution Index=100).”
• The Effect of Air Pollution on Mortality in China: Evidence from the 2008 (2016, unknown): “Nevertheless, Chen et al. (2012) found that the API is strongly correlated with NASA’s Aerosol Optical Depth data and the China Meteorological Administration’s visibility data; and such correlations do not change significantly when the API is just above or below 100.”
• From Fog to Smog: the Value of Pollution Information (2019, background): “Recent research has found evidence of widespread manipulation of the API data (Andrews, 2008; Chen et al., 2012; Ghanem and Zhang, 2014; Greenstone et al., 2019).”
• Environment, Health, and Human Capital (2013, unknown): “19 While reported pollution levels in China may be subject to manipulation, evidence also indicates that reported pollution levels are highly correlated with data from independent sources (Chen et al. 2013).”
• Brain drain: The impact of air pollution on firm performance (2020, background): “In particular, the API data for all cities on June 4, 2008 are missing for an unknown reason (Chen et al., 2012).”
• Run away? Air pollution and emigration interests in China (2017, methodology): “For example, Chen et al. (2012) use data from the air pollution index (API) from 2000 to 2009 and find that, as a result of local government officers’ promotion incentives, the air pollution data may be manipulated to achieve the number of “blue sky days” in a year.”
• Performance Management, High-Powered Incentives, and Environmental Policies in China (2015, methodology): “Unlike Chen et al. (2012), we use raw emissions, rather than the daily air pollution index (API), a longitudinal tracking system (coding ‘‘blue sky day’’) created by the central government, and more subject to misreporting or strategic reporting than measures of direct emissions.”
• Career concerns and multitasking local bureaucrats: Evidence of a target-based performance evaluation system in China (2018, background): “Under the target-based system, firms or individuals would be incentivized to manipulate data and reporting to achieve the pre-set goal (Bevan and Hood, 2006; Chen et al., 2012; Gao, 2015).”