Environmental regulations have both bright and dark consequences, and understanding the
dark side is critical for policymakers. This paper investigates whether and how
environmental regulation exacerbates the wage inequality between skilled and unskilled
labor. Employing a triple difference-in-differences (DDD) estimation method on Chinese
urban household survey data, we find a 1.7% increase in the wage gap after the
implementation of a regional-specific environmental regulation. We show that the enlarged …