Firm Presence, Pollution, and Agglomeration: Evidence from a Randomized Environmental Place-Based Policy

We are grateful to the International Growth Center (IGC), MIT Sloan School of Management, the National Science Foundation (NSF), Penn State University, Private Enterprise Development in Low-Income Countries (PEDL) and Structural Transformation and Economic Growth (STEG) for financial support. We would like to thank Jonathan Eaton, Glenn Ellison, Robert Gibbons, Michael Greenstone, Paul Grieco, Dominic Leggett, Melanie Morten, Rohini Pande, Claudia Steinwender, Adam Storeygard, Daniel Xu, and seminar audiences at ASU, Berkeley, ISI Delhi, MIT, NBER, Oxford, Penn State, Stanford, UBC, UChicago, University of Pennsylvania, University of Warwick, and Yale for helpful comments, and Christina Antonakakis, David Cai, Zixu Chen, Caio Figueiredo, Valentina Goetz, Shuhang Lou, Hanna Marsho, Esma Ozer, Garima Singal, and Charlotte Wachter for excellent research assistance. All errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• April 15, 2025