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Most highways in urban China are tolled to finance their construction. During the eight-day National Day holiday in 2012, highway tolls are waived nationwide for passenger vehicles. We use this to test highway tolls' effect on air pollution. Using daily pollution and weather data for 98 Chinese cities in 2011 and 2012 and employing both a regression discontinuity design and differences-indifferences method with 2011 National Day holiday as a control, we find that eliminating tolls increases pollution by 20% and decreases visibility by one kilometer. We also estimate that the toll elasticity of air pollution is 0.16. These findings complement the scant literature on the environmental impact of road pricing.

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This paper estimates the impact of the first nationwide e-commerce expansion program on rural households. To do so, we combine a randomized control trial with new survey and administrative microdata. In contrast to existing case studies, we find little evidence for income gains to rural producers and workers. Instead, the gains are driven by a reduction in cost of living for a minority of rural households that tend to be younger, richer, and in more remote markets. These effects are mainly due to overcoming logistical barriers to e-commerce rather than additional investments to adapt e-commerce to the rural population. (JEL I31, L81, O12, O18, P25, P36)

This paper develops a new approach for measuring the stringency of a major form of land-use regulation, building-height restrictions, and it applies the method to an extraordinary dataset of land-lease transactions from China. Our theory shows that the elasticity of land price with respect to the floor-area ratio (FAR), an indicator of the allowed building height for the parcel, is a measure of the regulation's stringency (the extent to which FAR is kept below the free-market level). Using a national sample, estimation that allows this elasticity to be city-specific shows substantial variation in the stringency of FAR regulation across Chinese cities, and additional evidence suggests that stringency depends on certain city characteristics in a predictable fashion. Singlecity estimation for the large Beijing subsample, where site characteristics can be added to the regression, indicates that the stringency of FAR regulation varies with certain site characteristics, again in a predictable way (being high near the Tiananmen historical sites). Further results using a different dataset show that FAR limits in Beijing are adjusted in response to demand forces created by new subway stops.

This paper estimates the impact of the first nationwide e-commerce expansion program on rural households. To do so, we combine a randomized control trial with new survey and administrative microdata. In contrast to existing case studies, we find little evidence for income gains to rural producers and workers. Instead, the gains are driven by a reduction in cost of living for a minority of rural households who tend to be younger, richer and in more remote markets. These effects are mainly due to overcoming logistical barriers to e-commerce, rather than to additional investments to adapt e-commerce to the rural population.

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