Adopting a Cleaner Technology: The Effect of Driving Restrictions on Fleet Turnover

Francisco Gallego, Juan-Pablo Montero and Hernán Barahona

No 469, Documentos de Trabajo from Instituto de Economia. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Abstract: Driving restrictions —limits on car use based on the last digit of a car’s license plate— are increasingly popular forms of pollution and congestion control, notwithstanding the literature has shown they typically result in more pollution by moving the fleet composition toward higher-emitting vehicles. We study a design feature present in some restriction programs but much overlooked in the literature: that cleaner cars be exempted from the restriction. Based on evidence from Santiago- Chile’s 1992 program, we find this exemption feature to have a large impact on fleet composition toward cleaner vehicles. We also develop and calibrate for Santiago a vertical-differentiation model of the car market to show that driving restrictions that make optimal use of these exemptions can be way more effective in the fight against local air pollution than alternative instruments such as scrappage subsidies and gasoline taxes.

JEL-codes: J14 L26 M53 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-res, nep-tre and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.economia.uc.cl/docs/doctra/dt-469.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Adopting a Cleaner Technology: The Effect of Driving Restrictions on Fleet Turnover (2016)
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:ioe:doctra:469

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos de Trabajo from Instituto de Economia. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jaime Casassus ().