Gauging the air quality of New York: a non-linear Nexus between COVID-19 and nitrogen dioxide emission

The primary objective of the study is to analyse the relationship between COVID-19 and nitrogen dioxide in New York City during the global pandemic. Notably, the study has investigated the direct influence of lockdown circumstances (due to COVID-19) and plunge in the population of New York on its environmental contamination. The study utilized the Non-Linear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) model to ascertain the asymmetric impact of COVID-19 on the environmental quality of the USA. The results reveal that lockdown has played a significant role in the environmental quality of the USA. Notably, an escalation in the registered cases of COVID-19 has a meaningful and indirect relationship with environmental pollution in the UAS. Besides, as the lockdown state goes normal, it results in an explosion in the environmental pollution in the USA. Also, deaths due to COVID-19 substantively improve the environmental quality in the short-term period as well as in the long-term period.