The DOI matches its Crossref record; 25 of the 25 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Water Pollution Progress at Borders: The Role of Changes in China's Political Promotion Incentives
Abstract
At political boundaries, local leaders have weak incentives to reduce polluting activity because the social costs are borne by downstream neighbors. This paper exploits a natural experiment set in China in which the central government changed the local political promotion criteria and thus incentivized local officials to reduce border pollution along specific criteria. We document evidence of pollution progress with respect to targeted criteria at province boundaries. Heavy metal pollutants, not targeted by the central government, have not decreased in concentration after the regime shift. Using data on the economic geography of key industrial water polluters, we explore possible mechanisms. (JEL D72, O13, O18, P25, P28, Q25, Q53)
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
How Much Should We Trust Differences-in-Differences Estimates?
Bertrand, M., Duflo, E., & Mullainathan, S. (2004) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1162/003355304772839588 · Cited by 10,641
Economic growth and the environment
Grossman, G. M., & Krueger, A. B. (1995) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.2307/2118443 · Cited by 9,901
Multitask principal – agent analyses: Incentive contracts, asset ownership, and job design
Holmstrom, B., & Milgrom, P. (1991) · The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization · doi:10.1093/jleo/7.special_issue.24 · Cited by 6,046
Political turnover and economic performance: the incentive role of personnel control in China
Li, H., & Zhou, L.-A. (2005) · Journal of Public Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2004.06.009 · Cited by 3,668
GMM Estimation with Cross Sectional Dependence
Conley, T. G. (1999) · Journal of Econometrics · doi:10.1016/s0304-4076(98)00084-0 · Cited by 2,685
Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space
Henderson, J. V., Storeygard, A., & Weil, D. N. (2012) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.102.2.994 · Cited by 2,596
Pre-Colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development
(2013) · Econometrica · doi:10.3982/ecta9613 · Cited by 953
Economic Growth and the Environment: A Review of Theory and Empirics
Brock, W. A., & Taylor, M. S. (2005) · Handbook of Economic Growth · doi:10.1016/s1574-0684(05)01028-2 · Cited by 527
Polluting thy neighbor: Unintended consequences of China׳s pollution reduction mandates
Cai, H., Chen, Y., & Gong, Q. (2016) · Journal of Environmental Economics and Management · doi:10.1016/j.jeem.2015.01.002 · Cited by 472
Shared waters: Conflict and cooperation
Wolf, A. T. (2007) · Annual Review of Environment and Resources · doi:10.1146/annurev.energy.32.041006.101434 · Cited by 432
Cited by
Watering Down Environmental Regulation in China*
He, G., Wang, S., & Zhang, B. (2020) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1093/qje/qjaa024 · Cited by 935
Chen, Y. J., Li, P., & Lu, Y. (2018) · Journal of Development Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jdeveco.2018.02.001 · Cited by 678
Self-citationEnvirodevonomics: A Research Agenda for an Emerging Field
Greenstone, M., & Jack, B. K. (2015) · Journal of Economic Literature · doi:10.1257/jel.53.1.5 · Cited by 300
Efficacy of Command-and-Control and Market-Based Environmental Regulation in Developing Countries
Blackman, A., Li, Z., & Liu, A. A. (2018) · Annual Review of Resource Economics · doi:10.1146/annurev-resource-100517-023144 · Cited by 258
Liu, W., Shen, J., & Wei, Y. D. (2023) · Journal of Environmental Management · doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.116501 · Cited by 28
Metadata
- Authors
- Kahn, M. E., Li, P., & Zhao, D.
- Venue
- American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 2015-11-01
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 223-242
- ISSN
- 1945-7731 (ISSN-L)
- 1945-774X
- OpenAlex
- W2215881695
- Cited by
- 485
- References
- 25
- FWCI
- 19.22
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Water Pollution Progress at Borders: The Role of Changes in China's Political Promotion Incentives. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1257/pol.20130367
- The paper
- Kahn, M. E., Li, P., & Zhao, D. (2015). Water Pollution Progress at Borders: The Role of Changes in China's Political Promotion Incentives. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.20130367
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.