Estimating the effect of air pollution on road safety using atmospheric temperature inversions
利用大气逆温作为外生变量,估计了2009-2014年英国空气污染对交通事故数量的影响,发现PM2.5每增加1 μg/m3,每日事故车辆数增加0.3-0.6%。
Does air quality influence road safety? We estimate the effect of increased air pollution on the number of road traffic accidents in the United Kingdom between 2009 and 2014. To address concerns of spurious correlation we exploit atmospheric temperature inversions as a source of plausibly exogenous variation in daily air pollution levels. We find an increase of 0.3–0.6% in the number of vehicles involved in accidents per day for each additional 1 μg/m3 of PM2.5. The finding suggests that less safe roads may present a large and previously overlooked cost of air pollution. The results are robust to a number of specifications and across various sub-samples.