Employing hourly data records from 2013 and 2014 in Beijing, we investigate the causal effects of vehicle traffic on air pollution. An arguably exogenous variation in vehicle use that results from the staggered and rotating driving restriction program there, combined with a widespread Chinese superstition about the unlucky number four, allows us to better track causal effects of traffic-induced air pollutants in a generalized 2SLS framework.

We study the optimal and equilibrium distribution of industrial and residential land in a given region. The trade-off between the agglomeration and dispersion forces, in the form of pollution from stationary forces, production externalities, and commuting costs, determines the emergence of industrial and residential clusters across space. In this context, we define two kinds of spatial policies that can be used in order to close the gap between optimal and market allocations.

The bulk of existing work on the statistical forecasting of air quality is based on either neural networks or linear regressions, which are both subject to important drawbacks.

We estimate the implicit prices of the crime rate and airborne pollution in Chile, using spatially compensating price differentials in the housing and labor markets. We evaluate empirically the impact of different estimation strategies for the wage and rent equations, on the economic value of these two amenities. The results show that increments in the crime rate or in air pollution have a negative impact on welfare and that the estimated welfare measures and their variances are sensitive to selection bias, endogenous amenities and clustering effects.

This paper investigates and ranks a set of policy and technological interventions intended to reduce such health costs in the high population density areas of South Africa. The paper’s policy messages are that interventions should begin with households and that further industry controls are not yet justifiable in their present forms as these relate to the health care costs of such interventions.

The aim of the paper is to quantify individual willingness-to-pay measures of improved air quality in Sweden by using the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM). Such measures are important for policy makers when deciding about public investments and policy instruments in order to regulate environmental impacts, e.g. from road transportation and industry.