【题  目】Paving the Green Tracks: The Environmental Impact of Heavy-haul Railways in China

【时  间】2024年5月8日（星期三），14:00-15:30

【地  点】后主楼1610会议室

【主讲人】翟颖佳 博士生（北京大学光华管理学院）

【主持人】曹思未 副教授（北京师范大学经济与工商管理学院）

摘要： This paper studies how heavy-haul railways affect the environmental outcomes of air pollution. We exploit the large-scale progressive expansion of three heavy-haul railways in China as a quasi-natural experiment and construct a difference-in-difference model to identify its effect on air pollutants both along the heavy-haul railway itself and along the road transportation routes for coal that have been partly replaced by the heavy-haul railways. The results show that heavy-haul railway transportation is an environmentally clean mode of transportation. The substitution of road transport with heavy-haul railways leads to a decrease in air pollution within the counties traversed by key roads previously used for coal transportation. This shift results in a 1.5 percent reduction in PM2.5 in the area along these roads. The concentrations of other air pollutants, such as PM1, PM10, and NO2, which are mainly emitted by heavy-duty trucks transporting coal, have also been significantly reduced. In addition, “road-to-rail” has promoted the clustering of clean industries such as services and high-tech industries along the original transportation roads. The back-of-envelope calculations suggest significant economic benefits resulting from the health outcomes brought by the reduction of pollutant concentration. Our findings shed light on the contribution of freight railways to the reduction of air pollution and reveal the importance of the “road-to-rail” transportation transformation.

报告人简介：

翟颖佳，北京大学光华管理学院博士生。研究方向为城市经济学和创新经济学。在城市经济学领域，主要研究交通基础设施、土地规划利用对城市经济与环境的影响。在创新经济领域，主要关注专利的空间布局及其影响因素、专利合作空间网络等。研究发表在《经济研究》、《世界经济文汇》、《IScience》等期刊上。