Can urban land market reform mitigate industrial emissions? Environmental evidence from 257 prefecture-level cities in China.

In the period of planned economy, China used low-cost land investment to drive economic development for a long time, which brought problems such as low efficient use of natural resources and environmental pollution. Under the dual pressure of economic development and environmental protection, Chinese government has begun to implement the urban land market reform, hoping to gradually change the extensive economic development model with high input and low output through the market mechanism. In order to investigate whether the urban land market reform can reduce industrial emissions and promote the transformation of socioeconomic, this paper constructs industrial land transactions and socioeconomic panel data of 257 prefecture-level cities in China from 2007 to 2020.