Navigating the Green Transition: The Influence of Low-Carbon City Policies on Employment in China’s Listed Firms

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This study provides a detailed and well-founded analysis of the impact of China's low-carbon cities pilot policy on employment. The use of the progressive differences-in-differences (DID) model and analysis of microdata from Chinese A-share listed companies add credibility and depth to the research. Overall, the study is well structured and contributes to the understanding of the complexity of the impact of environmental policy on labor markets, underlining the importance of adapting strategies according to the skill level of the workforce.

The authors can consider the following aspects:

In the conclusions, the limits of the research and future research directions can be clearly highlighted. It is also beneficial for the authors to strengthen the discussion on how China's experience with the low-carbon city pilot policy can serve as a valuable reference for other developing nations facing similar environmental protection and employment challenges. Also, compare the results obtained by reporting to those highlighted by other research.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

1.      This paper focuses on the dynamic aspects of low carbon city policies in China.  This is an interesting idea.  However, the regression model setup and research steps remain unclear, which need further clarifications or improvements.

2.      Both Eqs. (2) and (3) are dealing with panel data.  However, there is no subscripts i and/or t in these two equations at all.  In Eq. (2), the last three terms are lambda, gamma, and mu.  It is not clear whether or not there are cross-sectional or period fixed effects.  It is also not clear whether or not this regression equation has a or more error terms.  In Table 4 there are both cross-sectional and period fixed effects.  However, there is no panel data statistical tests for model selection.  It is strongly suggested that the subscripts of all panel data variables should be clearly well labeled and the statistical tests for panel data model selection should be done and reported.

3.      Similarly, in Eq. (3) there is no subscripts I and/or t shown in the regression equation at all.  Please note that the panel data regression results can be very different from those obtained from OLS.  Because the model specifications and research steps are not clearly done and reported, the unbiasedness and robustness of the estimated results are not assured in the current version of this paper.

4.      This paper claims to study the dynamics of employment.  However, in addition to the panel data regression which should be meant to run in the text, it is not clear what kinds of dynamics have been formally modified in the regression equations in Eqs. (2) and (3).  If there is no measureable terms formally modeled in these regression equations, the term ‘dynamics’ should not be mis-used from the title to the conclusion.

5.      As the first paragraph in the conclusion indicates, this paper simply finds that the city-level environmental policy has positive effects on employment.  However, there is no clear ‘employment mechanism’ shown and empirically tested in this paper.

6.      Table 11 reports very interesting results of the effects of city-level environmental policy on the educational background and occupational background.  However, these are direct effects estimated from the panel data regressions.  The mechanism of how the city-level environmental policy has these positive effects still needs further elaboration. For instance, the mediation or moderation effects can be further explored.

Moderate English editing is required.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors, thank you for your valuable research.

First of all I would like to congratulate the authors for this paper and the methodological approach used.

Some minor comments:

-The focus of your work is China, an emerging economy. Your literature review only focus on US and EU and did not explored the concerns and already existing works on emerging countries like China. Although you mentioned that the innovation of your work is the focus on China as an emerging economy, it seems that you should discuss a little bit further what has being done for emerging countries in the former literature and what is the relevance of discussing this matter in places like China. Doing that, you would be able to expand the results of your work to a more broader audience, with a rich discussion of the matter to other countries in similar situation.

- In addition, regarding your methodological approach: which are the fixed effects specific to each industries? What are the type of industries being observed here. Please, explore a little bit more the type of industries that you are considering. Maybe a map/graph by type and size would be interesting.

Thank you.

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

1.      The authors have taken almost all suggestions from this reviewer and made substantial improvements in accordance.  Especially, they carefully re-checked all panel data expressions and incorporated the moderating effects into panel data regressions, as suggested from this reviewer.  This paper should make an important city-level empirical literature in the future.  Two minor points remain to clarify or improve.

2.      There is still no panel data regression model selection test in the revised version.  This paper still directly assumes the fixed-effects models and then runs them.  There should be panel data model selection tests such as F-tests, LM-tests, Hausman tests, etc.

3.      The conclusion is too short with less than one full page in total.  Actually the authors have already done a lot in this paper.  It is strongly suggested that the new findings should be further elaborated, especially the employment effects by the city-level low-carbon policies.

Acceptable

Author Response

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