The Effect of Owning a Car on Travel Behavior: Evidence from the Beijing License Plate Lottery
Joshua Linn,
Jun Yang,
Antung A. Liu and
Ping Qin
RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future
Abstract:
To reduce pervasive problems of traffic congestion and air pollution, many cities in developing countries have considered restricting vehicle ownership. There is no empirical evidence on these programs’ efficacy and costs, but other prior work suggests that not having a car increases the cost of commuting and limits the set of job opportunities. However, these prior studies do not address the endogeneity of car ownership. We leverage a unique policy, the Beijing license plate lottery, to estimate the effect of restricting vehicles on distance traveled and commuting time, while addressing the endogeneity of car ownership. We find that adding a car has little impact on total distance traveled or time spent traveling, but a large impact on mode of travel. While reducing car ownership by 20 percent and car travel distance by 10 percent in Beijing, this policy has not added significantly to overall distances traveled or commute times.
Date: 2016-05-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-tre and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.rff.org/research/publications/effect-ow ... icense-plate-lottery (application/pdf)
Related works:
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:rff:dpaper:dp-16-18
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Resources for the Future ().