Keep Your Clunker in the Suburb: Low Emission Zones and Adoption of Green Vehicles

By Hendrik Wolff. Social Science Research Network, 2014

262 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Spatial distribution and leakage effects are of great policy concern and increasingly discussed in the economics literature. Here we study Europe's most aggressive recent air pollution regulation: Low Emission Zones are areas in which vehicular access is allowed only to vehicles that emit low levels of air pollutants. Using new administrative datasets from Germany, we assess the distribution of air pollution and the spatial substitution effects in green versus dirty vehicles. We find that LEZs decrease air pollution by around nine percent in urban traffic centers while pollution is unchanged in non-traffic areas. These results are driven by our finding that vehicle owners have an incentive to adopt cleaner technologies the closer they live to an LEZ. We reject the widespread concern that dirty vehicles contribute to higher pollution levels by increasingly driving longer routes outside of the LEZ. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that the health benefits of roughly two billion dollars have come at a cost of just over 1 billion dollars for upgrading the fleet of vehicles. Moreover, we find that non-attainment cities that decided not to include an LEZ but engaged in other methods (building ring roads, enhancing public transportation), experience no decrease in pollution.

Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9555baee5895a447f6137e8e176041709c908c75

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

1. C.-Y. Cynthia Lin Lawell
2. Shaojian Chen
3. Junqin Sun
4. Hui Mao

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

1. Victoria Umanskaya
2. C.-Y. Cynthia Lin Lawell
3. Wei Zhang
4. Shaojian Chen
5. Junqin Sun
6. Hui Mao

In Transportation

1. C.-Y. Cynthia Lin Lawell
2. Shaojian Chen
3. Junqin Sun
4. Hui Mao

Citations in the corpus

• Bicycle Infrastructure and Traffic Congestion: Evidence from DC's Capital Bikeshare (2018, unknown): “(19)Evidence of similar spatial substitution among automobile drivers as a response to traffic policy can be found in Wolff (2014).”
• The effects of license plate-based driving restrictions on air quality: Theory and empirical evidence (2017, background): “However, spatial substitution may not be a large concern for air quality in practice: in his study of Europe’s Low Emission Zones, Wolff (2014) finds that avoidance behavior of driving around Low Emissions Zones does not lead to significant spatial spillover effects in air pollution.”
• Low-Carbon City Construction and Corporate Carbon Reduction Performance: Evidence From a Quasi-Natural Experiment in China (2021, methodology): “For example, using difference-in-differences (DID) model, Wolff (2014) assessed the impact of European low-emission zones (LEZs) policy on air pollution, and found that the low-carbon zone policy resulted in a 9% reduction in PM10.”