Highway toll and air pollution: evidence from Chinese cities

Shihe Fu () and Yizhen Gu

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Most highways in urban China are tolled to finance their construction. During the eight-day National Day holiday in 2012, highway tolls are waived nationwide for passenger vehicles. We use this to test highway tolls’ effect on air pollution. Using daily pollution and weather data for 98 Chinese cities in 2011 and 2012 and employing both a regression discontinuity design and differences-in-differences method with 2011 National Day holiday as a control, we find that eliminating tolls increases pollution by 20% and decreases visibility by one kilometer. We also estimate that the toll elasticity of air pollution is 0.16. These findings complement the scant literature on the environmental impact of road pricing.

Keywords: highway toll; air pollution; visibility; regression discontinuity design; differences-in-differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H23 Q53 R41 R48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-10-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-ene, nep-env, nep-res, nep-tra, nep-tre and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/59619/1/MPRA_paper_59619.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Highway toll and air pollution: Evidence from Chinese cities (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:59619

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().