Estimating the effect of air pollution on road safety using atmospheric temperature inversions

By Lutz Sager. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2016

233 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper estimates the causal effect of increased ambient air pollution on the frequency of road traffic accidents in the United Kingdom between 2009 and 2014. An instrumental variable approach is applied, exploiting atmospheric temperature inversions as a source of plausibly exogenous variation in daily air pollution levels. The paper estimates the local average treatment effect for a geographic grid cell (1° X 1o) as an increase of 0:3 accidents per day for each additional 1SYNμg=m³ in the daily concentration of NO2. The effect is equivalent to an increase of 2% relative to the average number of daily accidents. The results appear robust to multiple sources of potential confounding, measurement error and co-emission bias.

Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cccd1115423f1dfa3f9e3da530eb6b1ed39b0504

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. Shihe Fu
2. Brian Viard
3. Peng Zhang
4. Sefi Roth
5. Malvina Bondy
6. Lutz Sager

In Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

1. Sefi Roth
2. Shihe Fu
3. Malvina Bondy
4. Brian Viard
5. Peng Zhang

Citations in the corpus

• Crime Is in the Air: The Contemporaneous Relationship between Air Pollution and Crime (2020, methodology): “Similarly, Sager (2016) finds an effect of pollution on traffic accidents, but not on the share involving “hitand-run,” which may be considered particularly unethical and aggressive behavior.”
• Air Quality and Manufacturing Firm Productivity: Comprehensive Evidence from China (2017, methodology): “…(2SLS) with the firststage equation: 14 Arceo et al. (2015) estimates the effect on infant mortality in Mexico City, Hicks et al. (2016) on procyclical mortality in the U.S., Jans et al. (2016) on child respiratory health in Sweden, and Sager (2016) on traffic accidents in the United Kingdom.”