When the Fire Ends: Straw Burning, Regulation, and Pollution Substitu-tion

Abstract Environmental regulations can trigger unintended pollution externalities if they lack well-designed eco-nomic incentives or fail to account for the responses of polluters. This paper examines the effectiveness and unintended consequences of the Universal Prohibition on Straw Burning (UPSB) policy in China. By ex-ploiting a generalized difference-in-differences design, we find that the …

https://www.haihong.me/files/2025-WP-Straw-Burning-Regulation.pdf