Publications
Does Pollution Prevention Enhance Firm Efficiency? Insights from US Manufacturing Firms (with Sumaya Falak Memon and Subal Kumbhakar) (International Journal of Industrial Organization, 107, August, 2026)
Under-Identification of Structural Models based on Timing and Information Set Assumptions (with Daniel Ackerberg, Garth Frazer, Kyoo il Kim, and Yao Luo) (Journal of Econometrics, 237(1), November, 2023) (Working paper version, June 2022)
Ownership and Productivity in Vertically-Integrated Firms: Evidence from the Chinese Steel Industry (with Loren Brandt, Feitao Jiang and Yao Luo) (The Review of Economics and Statistics, 104 (1): 101–115, 2022) [Online Appendix] [Featured in VoxChina]
A Robust Approach to Estimating Production Functions: Replication of the ACF Procedure (with Kyoo il Kim and Yao Luo) (Journal of Applied Econometrics, 34(4), 612-619, 2019)
Working Papers
Geography of Market Power: Evidence from the Chinese Steel Industry (with Loren Brandt, Feitao Jiang, Yao Luo) [Featured in VoxChina]
Capital-Moment Informativeness and Weak Identification in Production Function Estimation (with Kyoo il Kim and Yao Luo)
Environmental Regulation and Within-Firm Adjustment: Evidence from Chinese Steel (with Pan Chen and Feitao Jiang) (Draft available upon request)
Abstract: Firms can comply with environmental regulation by changing how they produce or by treating pollution after it is generated, but firm-level data rarely capture both responses. Using annual stage-level production, environmental, and financial records for Chinese steel firms, we implement a difference-in-differences design that exploits cross-city variation in target-associated regulatory pressure under China’s 2016–2020 Good-Air Days targets. Greater regulatory pressure is associated with adjustment along both margins. The converter scrap share rises by 2.1 percentage points per standard deviation of target intensity—about one fifth the size of the national increase—as firms substitute scrap for pig iron, reducing the sulfur-intensive sintering each ton of steel requires. Environmental investment rises by about 119 million CNY, or 45% of its sample mean, concentrated in air-pollution control. SO2 emissions per ton of crude steel fall by about 20%, while pre-tax profit rises by about 70 CNY per ton of crude steel, about 1.1% of per-ton operating revenue. More broadly, firms can respond to the same regulatory pressure through margins that differ in cost and in the nature of the resulting environmental improvements—differences that emissions and financial outcomes alone cannot reveal.
Work in Progress
Vehicle Emission Standard and Air Pollution: Evidence from China (with Jieqi Cai, Yakai Yao, Zhe Yuan) (Draft coming soon)
Pollution Prevention or Green Innovation? Unraveling Firms’ Environmental Choices (with Sumaya Memon and Wenya Wang) (Draft coming soon)
Capacity Investment Under Demand Uncertainty: Evidence from the Chinese Steel Industry (with Loren Brandt, Feitao Jiang, Yao Luo)