Abstract

With marketization of the refined oil price, the Chinese government still uses price adjustments of refined oil to control air pollution. In this paper, an event study analysis is used to investigate the impact of refined oil price adjustment on air quality of eleven cities in Hebei Province. It is found that the impact of increases in refined oil price is larger than the impact of decreases. This implies an improvement of air quality. And the higher the price increases, the larger the impact is on air quality. Hoverer, refined oil price adjustments are generally not too large, it suggests that suspension of price adjustment of refined oil is not a viable method to improve the air quality. Other policies such as raising vehicle emission standards and fuel quality may be considered.

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