@article{Environmental:6445,
      recid = {6445},
      author = {Song, Yuqi},
      title = {Essays on Environmental Policies in China},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2023-06},
      abstract = {As the world's largest developing economy with growing  concerns about how to counter environmental and climate  shocks while maintaining its economic growth, China has  developed various environmental policy tools throughout the  past few decades. My dissertation includes three chapters  of research that study the socio-economic impacts of two  important Chinese environmental policies, the public good  of quality weather forecasts, which aims to help people's  adaptation to extreme weathers happening in the near  future, and the long-run road rationing policy applied in  nine major Chinese cities, which aims to limit emissions  from vehicles on road and lower city level pollutions.  Overall, my research identifies the differential policy  impacts of these different policy tools of China in  tackling environmental problems. 	
The first two chapters  are research under the greater project of "The Value of  Weather Forecasts". For this project, I construct a novel  dataset of 24-hour city-level weather forecasts in China,  using Google speech-to-text API to transcribe videos of the  national weather forecast TV programs to collect the actual  information broadcast and received by the general public.  From these research, I find that there exist significant  behavior responses to the accuracy of weather forecast  information in China. In Chapter 1, I show that accurate  instead of inaccurate daily temperature forecasts of  uncomfortable temperatures (extreme hot and medium-cold)  lead to significant decreases in labor working hours per  day. This shows that accurate weather forecast information  helps in laborer's decisions to work less under weather  shocks, in order to avoid potential health risks.  Correspondingly, improved accuracy of weather forecasts  contributes significant social values. The welfare analysis  of this chapter estimates a marginal value of weather  forecast accuracy as 930 2015 Yuan (148 2015 USD) per  worker per year. Social benefits of accurate weather  forecasts are also represented in Chapter 2, which  demonstrates that when realized temperatures are extremely  low, the negatively impacted average social sentiment  (summarized with natural language processing analysis of  city-level daily social media posts in 2014) is  significantly improved, if accurate instantaneous  temperature forecasts are provided. 
	
The third chapter  analyzes the impacts of a well-known environmental policy  in China, the end-number license plate policy, of a  long-run, less strict version imposed over a set of 9 big  cities of China restricting one-fifth of private vehicles  per day on weekdays. This version of the road rationing  policy is shown to have limited impacts in effectively  reducing city-level air pollutions over the timeline of a  decade, contrary to previous literatures showing that the  short-run, strict version of this policy can significantly  improve air qualities. The ambiguity of the policy effects  implies people's behavior changes in response to the  long-run road rationing policy, and provides useful  implications on motivating instead of requiring people to  change their daily activities for the society goal of  cutting air pollutant emissions with different policy  tools. },
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/6445},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.6445},
}