The Effect of Air Pollution on Migration: Evidence from China

By Shuai Chen, Paulina Oliva, Peng Zhang. Social Science Research Network, 2017

493 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper looks at the effects of air pollution on migration in China using changes in the average strength of thermal inversions over five-year periods as a source of exogenous variation for medium-run air pollution levels. Our findings suggest that air pollution is responsible for large changes in inflows and outflows of migration in China. More specifically, we find that independent changes in air pollution of the magnitude that occurred in China in the course of our study (between 1996 and 2010) are capable of reducing floating migration inflows by 50 percent and of reducing population through net outmigration by 5 percent in a given county. We find that these inflows are primarily driven by well educated people at the beginning of their professional careers, leading to substantial changes in the sociodemographic composition of the population and labor force of Chinese counties. Our results are robust to different specifications, including simple counts of inversions as instruments, different weather controls, and different forms of error variance.

Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Sociology and Political Science, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f4f18857fdd6f420481a76518a3b8ed98996e382

Citations in the corpus

Brain drain: The impact of air pollution on firm performance (2020, unknown): “Compared with less skilled individuals, the hukou system has a weaker impact on more educated and highly skilled individuals, who face lower migration costs and have greater latitude to change their registered residences (Chen et al., 2017).”
East-Side Story: Historical Pollution and Persistent Neighborhood Sorting (2016, unknown): “…who argues that coal-based pollution was a signiﬁcant disamenity, with a strong negative impact on city size in England during industrialization, and Chen, Oliva, and Zhang (2017) and Freeman et al. (2019), who document a similar correlation between pollution and residential choices be-tween…”