Is air pollution politics or economics? Evidence from industrial heterogeneity.

This paper checks the asymmetrical impact of Beijing's and Shanghai's air quality (AQ) on cross-industries stock returns (SR) by using the quantile-on-quantile (QQ) regression method. The major empirical findings as shown as followings. There are heterogeneous responses from SR to AQ within the same city. Different links are discovered for Beijing and Shanghai within the same industry. Air pollution does not have political or economic properties for all industries. Our research provides useful contributions compared with past literature. First of all, we distinguish whether air pollution is political or economic. Apart from psychology and physiology, government intervention and economic expectation are also important components in interpreting the influence from AQ to SR. Second, this study adequately considers the heterogeneity of industries. Industries differently react to the identical extrinsic shock, depending on the nature of their industry. Besides, the QQ approach captures quantile-varying relationship between variables, and does not need to consider structural fracture and time lag effects. The practical significance is that investors need to focus on national industrial policies, and avoiding biased decisions in stock market from air pollution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]