Research

China's 2016 reform transferred air quality monitoring stations from local to independent operation, eliminating officials' ability to manipulate pollution data. I show that officials responded by strategically reallocating land near stations to parks and green space. Using one million land transactions matched to station coordinates in a difference-in-differences design, I find the green-space share within 5 km of stations nearly doubled. Satellite data confirm genuine air quality improvement, and housing prices near stations rose substantially. Yet benefits concentrate spatially around stations, creating environmental inequality. These findings suggest that when one gaming channel is blocked, agents substitute toward alternatives whose welfare consequences depend on the extent to which the new gaming channels align with the welfare objective.