Economic Development Zones have been proven to be an economic success and have been pursued by many governments around the world over the past several decades, but there is still a research gap on their impact on the environment. This paper documents the effect of national-level EDZs on the environmental performance of firms. Combining rich firm and administrative data in China from 1998–2012, we exploit the relationship between the foundation of EDZs and firms’ pollution emissions with a multi-period differences-in-differences model. We find...
