Alerts work! Air quality warnings and cycling

Soodeh Saberian; Anthony Heyes; Nicholas Rivers

doi:10.1016/j.reseneeco.2017.05.004

Alerts work! Air quality warnings and cycling

Soodeh Saberian, Anthony Heyes, Nicholas Rivers^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Economics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

43 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Alert programs are central to strategies to reduce pollution exposure and manage its impact. To be effective alerts have to change behavior, but evidence that they do that is sparse. Indeed the majority of published studies fail to find a significant impact of alerts on the outcome behavior that they study. Alerts particularly seek to influence energetic cardio-vascular outdoor pursuits. This study is the first to use administrative data to show that they are effective in reducing participation in such a pursuit (namely cycle use in Sydney, Australia), and to our knowledge the first to show that they are effective in changing any behavior in a non-US setting. We are careful to disentangle possible reactions to realised air quality from the ‘pure’, causal effect of the issuance of an alert. Our results suggest that when an air quality alert is issued, the amount of cycling is reduced by 14–35%, which is a substantial behavioral response. The results are robust to the inclusion of a battery of controls in various combinations, alternative estimation methods and non-linear specifications. We develop various sub-sample results, and also find evidence of alert fatigue.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	165-185
Number of pages	21
Journal	Resource and Energy Economics
Volume	49
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.reseneeco.2017.05.004
Publication status	Published - Aug 2017

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Heyes is also a part-time Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex. We are grateful to Pierre Brochu, Maya Papineau, Matthew Neidell, Brandon Schaufele, Joel Bruneau, participants at the 2014 Meeting of the CREE and two referees from this journal for very constructive comments. Heyes and Rivers both hold Canada Research Chairs and acknowledge the financial support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program. Errors are ours.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Elsevier B.V.

Keywords

Averting behavior
Health impacts of air pollution
Information-based regulation
Urban air quality

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Economics and Econometrics

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.1016/j.reseneeco.2017.05.004

Cite this

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abstract = "Alert programs are central to strategies to reduce pollution exposure and manage its impact. To be effective alerts have to change behavior, but evidence that they do that is sparse. Indeed the majority of published studies fail to find a significant impact of alerts on the outcome behavior that they study. Alerts particularly seek to influence energetic cardio-vascular outdoor pursuits. This study is the first to use administrative data to show that they are effective in reducing participation in such a pursuit (namely cycle use in Sydney, Australia), and to our knowledge the first to show that they are effective in changing any behavior in a non-US setting. We are careful to disentangle possible reactions to realised air quality from the {\textquoteleft}pure{\textquoteright}, causal effect of the issuance of an alert. Our results suggest that when an air quality alert is issued, the amount of cycling is reduced by 14–35%, which is a substantial behavioral response. The results are robust to the inclusion of a battery of controls in various combinations, alternative estimation methods and non-linear specifications. We develop various sub-sample results, and also find evidence of alert fatigue.",

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Alerts work! Air quality warnings and cycling

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

UN SDGs

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