The Sustainable Urbanization Lab’s research on the impacts of the pandemic on air pollution “Clean Air as an Experience Good” (joint work by Siqi Zheng, Matthew Kahn and Weizheng Sun) was recently featured in VoxChina:
“A novel feature of [our] study is how we measure the sensitivity to air pollution of residents of each city. Rather than relying on survey data, we use Big Data from Chinese social media. In recent research (Zheng et al. 2019), we use billions of social media messages posted on the equivalent of China’s Twitter, Weibo, to explore how the sentiment (expressed happiness) of the population in 144 cities is affected by pollution. Residents of different cities vary with respect to how sensitive they are to air pollution. We measure this by estimating a city-specific partial derivative of happiness (as revealed by social media content analysis) with respect to the city/day PM2.5 level (“sentiment-pollution” sensitivity)”. Read the full article.
Professor Siqi Zheng joined the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Global Future Council on Clean Air, which comprises experts across health, energy, cities, mobility from prominent NGOs, governments, private sector, and academia.