Volume 31: Clean Energy Technologies towards Carbon Neutrality

Has Smart City Construction Reduced Corporate Pollution Emissions? New Evidence from Chinese Corporate Pollution Data Juan Li, Zixuan Li, Huiping You

Abstract

Using China’s smart city construction as a quasi-natural experiment, by matching the data of the Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database, Chinese Enterprises Pollution Emission Database and prefecture-level city data from 2008-2014, this paper evaluates the impact of smart city construction on enterprise pollution emissions using the difference-in-difference method (DID) and propensity score matching DID method (PSM-DID). The empirical results show that smart cities construction effectively promotes the pollution reduction of enterprises, and the estimation results based on the PSM-DID method show robust. The mechanism investigation shows that smart city construction can achieve effective suppression of enterprise pollution emissions through the output effect, technology effect and scale effect.

Keywords smart city, enterprise pollution emission, quasi-natural experiment, DID, Chinese Enterprises Pollution Emission Database