Self-protection investment exacerbates air pollution exposure inequality in urban China

Abstract

Urban China's high levels of ambient air pollution both lowers quality of life and raises mortality risk. China's wealthy have the purchasing power to purchase private products such as portable room air filters that allows them to offset some of the pollution exposure risk. Using a unique data set of Internet purchases, we document that households invest more in masks and air filter products when ambient pollution levels exceed key alert thresholds. Richer people are more likely to invest in air filters, which are much more expensive than masks. Our findings have implications for trends in inequality in human capital accumulation and in quality of life inequality in urban China.

The winter choke: Coal-Fired heating, air pollution, and mortality in China

“…First, rural residents in China are substantially poorer than urban residents. As income levels play an important role in determining people's avoidance behaviors and thus the actual air pollution exposure (Ito and Zhang, forthcoming;Sun et al, 2017), rural residents may be disproportionally affected by air pollution. Second, air pollution information is readily available in urban areas, but the same information is difficult to obtain in rural This is the Pre-Published Version areas.…”

Does clean air increase the demand for the consumer city? Evidence from Beijing

“…Self-protection strategies, such as wearing masks, using air purifiers and staying inside, can lower people's exposure to pollution (Sun, Kahn, & Zheng, 2017;Zhang & Mu, 2018;Zhang, Sun, Liu, & Zheng, 2016), whereas it also lowers their consumer surplus as they lose access to their city's diverse set of shopping and socializing opportunities. To motivate our empirical work, we introduce a simple demand framework to highlight the linkages of interest.…”

“…During our study period for restaurant visits, roughly 26 percent of the real "dirty days" were successfully forecasted by this Office with such a pollution alert issued. If Beijing residents form their expectation on the basis of such alerts and engage in extra avoidance behavior (Sun et al, 2017), we would observe a larger drop in restaurant visits when such an alert is issued in advance. We test for such an anticipation effect by excluding the days with advanced alert in our restaurant RDD model (column (3) in Panel A).…”

Impacts of Different Air Pollutants on Dining-Out Activities and Satisfaction of Urban and Suburban Residents

“…Unlike the significant impact of O 3 on suburban residents, none of the five pollutants had an observable effect on the satisfaction of urban residents (see Table 6). The possible reasons are that people with different incomes and education levels invest differently in environmental defensive strategies [47]. People with higher incomes and education tend to buy more expensive and effective defensive products, such as masks and air filters, to reduce exposure risks to outdoor and indoor pollution.…”