Effects of the COVID-19 on Air Quality: Human Mobility, Spillover Effects, and City Connections
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Effects of the COVID‑19 on Air Quality: Human Mobility, Spillover Effects, and City Connections Shasha Liu1 · Gaowen Kong2 · Dongmin Kong3 Accepted: 14 July 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract We quantify the causal effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on air quality in the context of China. Using the lockdowns in different cities as exogenous shocks, our difference-in-differences estimations show that lockdown policies significantly reduced air pollution by 12% on average. Based on the first lockdown city, Wuhan, we present three underlying mechanisms driving our findings: anticipatory effects, spillover effects, and a city’s level of connection with Wuhan. Our findings are more pronounced in cities whose population was more willing to self-isolate or more susceptible to anxiety, or whose government faces less pressure to stimulate economic growth. Overall, this study contributes to the literature by evaluating the unintended consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak for air quality, and provides timely policy implications for policymakers. Keywords COVID-19 · Air quality · Human mobility · Spillover · Connections JEL Classification Q53 · Q56 · F64 · O13
1 Introduction The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis was caused by a viral pandemic that abruptly and severely constricted human mobility and economic activity. Governments worldwide have increasingly implemented strict public health measures in response to the outbreak, such as social distancing and even complete lockdowns.
* Dongmin Kong [email protected] Shasha Liu [email protected] Gaowen Kong [email protected] 1
School of Management, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China
2
School of Management, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, China
3
School of Finance, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, China
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S. Liu et al.
The shock of the COVID-19 crisis gives us a unique opportunity to investigate the causal effect of social distancing or a pause in human mobility and economic activities, which is generally impossible, on air quality. In this paper, we exploit the exogenous shock of COVID-19 and use a variety of high-quality data sets to study the causal effect of an unprecedented change in human mobility and economic activity on air pollution in the Chinese context. We focus on China for two reasons. First, China suffers from severe air pollution (Chen et al. 2018; Freeman et al. 2019; Heyes and Zhu 2019; Shi and Xu 2018; Wang et al. 2018). Second, China offers a good setting for assessing the economic impact of COVID-19. It was the first country in the world to experience a large-scale outbreak, starting in January 2020, which means that there has been a sufficiently long post-outbreak period to ensure we have the statistical power for credible estimation. We use various difference-in-differences (DID) estimation strategies to disentangle the effect of COVID-19 on AQI from other confounding effects (Fang et al. 2020). In particular, we introduce two alternative specifications of the treat
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