The effect of Beijing’s driving restrictions on pollution and economic activity

V. Viard and Shihe Fu ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We evaluate the environmental and economic effects of Beijing’s driving restrictions. Based on daily data from multiple monitoring stations, air pollution falls 19% during every-other-day and 8% during one-day-per-week restrictions. Based on hourly viewership data, the number of television viewers during the restrictions increases 1.7 to 2.3% for workers with discretionary work time but is unaffected for workers without, consistent with the restrictions’ higher per-day commute costs reducing daily labor. Causal effects are identified from both time-series and spatial variation in air quality and intra-day variation in viewership. We provide possible reasons for the policy’s success, including evidence of high compliance based on parking garage entrance records. Our results contrast with previous findings of no pollution reductions from driving restrictions and provide new evidence on commute costs and labor supply.

Keywords: Driving restrictions; externalities; environmental economics; pollution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H23 J22 R40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-08-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/33009/1/MPRA_paper_33009.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The effect of Beijing's driving restrictions on pollution and economic activity (2015)
Working Paper: The Effect of Beijing’s Driving Restrictions on Pollution and Economic Activity (2013)
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:33009

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 ().