Abstract
This paper investigates the impact of an environmental amenity on regional skill aggregation, defined as the share of highly educated people. I analyzed the impact of air quality on skill aggregation across prefecture-level cities in China using college graduates as the measure of skill aggregation. By exploiting exogenous air quality variation from a Chinese heating policy known as the Huai River Policy, I identified a considerable negative impact of air pollution on the share of high-skilled people in the city population. This indicates that an environmental amenity has considerable potential to influence regional growth even in developing countries.
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