Reexamining the Empirical Evidence for an Environmental Kuznets Curve
使用全球城市空气污染面板数据,检验收入与污染之间倒U型关系的稳健性,发现结果对函数形式、样本变化高度敏感,不支持该曲线存在。
This paper uses an updated and revised panel data set on ambient air pollution in cities world-wide to examine the robustness of the evidence for the existence of an inverted-U-shaped relationship between national income and pollution. We test the sensitivity of the pollution-income relationship to functional forms, to additional covariates, and to changes in the nations, cities, and years sampled. We find that the results are highly sensitive to these changes, and conclude that there is little empirical support for an inverted-U-shaped relationship between several important air pollutants and national income in these data. Acknowledgments We would like to thank Jim Ziliak and two anonymous referees for helpful comments, and the