Can Urban Regeneration Initiatives Enhance the Synergistic Effect of Pollution and Carbon Reduction? Evidence from China

During the accelerated transition toward greener and more decarbonized development, urban regeneration initiatives have emerged as an important policy instrument for enhancing the synergistic effect of pollution and carbon reduction (SEPCR). Using panel data for 282 prefecture-level-and-above cities from 2006 to 2022, this study exploits the Ecological Restoration and Urban Repair (ERUR) pilot as an exogenous policy shock and applies a multi-period DID framework to identify its impact on SEPCR. The results show that the ERUR policy significantly enhances SEPCR by approximately 1.9%, and the findings remain robust across multiple robustness checks, including parallel trend tests, stacked DID, and double machine learning. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that policy effects differ across cities with varying geographical locations, resource endowments, industrial characteristics, and spatial forms. Mechanism analyses suggest that the improvement in SEPCR is primarily driven by economies of scale, industrial structure upgrading, and energy intensity improvement. This study extends the quantitative assessment framework of SEPCR and provides robust empirical evidence on how urban regeneration initiatives can be systematically harnessed to enhance urban SEPCR performance, offering important academic insights and policy-relevant implications for promoting green transformation, urban sustainable development, and ecological civilization construction.