Research On Effects Of Air Pollution On Urban Residents’ Happiness And Residential City Choice

A core area in the fields of urban economics and environmental economics is to understand how environmental quality affect urban quality of life and urban residents’cross-city location choice.Under the strategy of“people-oriented”new urbanization,it is crucial for local government to improve urban quality of life as well as attract and retain human capital,which can help the city realize high-quality development.By conducting both theoretical and empirical analysis,this thiesis quantitatively measures the effects of air pollution on urban residents’happiness and residential city choice,and contributes to both academic researches and management practices.On the basis of international cutting-edge researches,this thiesis theoretically analyzes how air pollution affects residential city choice,and further relates to urban population size and structure.By constructing happiness metric based on the expressed sentiment in the contents of geotagged tweets on the Chinese largest microblog platform Sina Weibo,this thesis quantitatively investigates the impact of air pollution on Chinese urban residents’happiness.Using different econometric empirical models,this thesis systematically explore how air pollution affects the sorting choice of floating population and graduates from Tsinghua University and the heterogeneous effects between different population groups.Based on the revealed preference theory,it is possible to calculate the utility constant trade-off ratios between air quality and income for marginal improvement in air quality.Mainly in quantitative perspective,this thesis identifies the impacts of air pollution on urban permanent population size and structure.The empirical findings of this thesis include:（1）High level of air pollution in China reduces urban population’s happiness.On average,a one standard deviation increase in the PM_2.5 concentration is associated with a 0.5 standard deviation decrease in the happiness index.Residents in richer cities are more sensitive to air pollution.（2）Air pollution has significantly negative effects on cities’inflow migration.To specify,a one standard deviation increase of annual average PM_2.5 concentration will lead to a 0.44standard deviation decrease in the probability that migrants move into the city.On average,each migrant household is willing to pay 172 yuan per day for one standard deviation decrease of annual PM_2.5 concentration.More educated migrants are more responsive to air pollution.（3）Severe air pollution has a significantly negative impact on a city’s power to retain and attract top talent.（4）In general,cities with severer air pollution has less permanent residents,among which the share of high educated population is lower.The theoretical and empirical findings of this thesis have significance in policy on three topics:（1）Local government should strengthen environmental quality management to improve residents’happiness and promote the construction of"people-oriented"new urbanization.（2）The effect of air pollution on cities’competence in labor market should be systematically understood to congregate human capital and promote high quality urbanization process by improving environmental quality.（3）The quantitative estimation should be used to evaluate the benefits of investments on environmental treatment more accurately and design related management policy more scientificly.