Impacts of winter heating on the atmospheric pollution of northern China’s prefectural cities: Evidence from a regression discontinuity design

The notorious atmospheric pollution during winter in vast northern Chinese cities has attracted increasing attentions, and studies from the perspective of winter heating are very limited. In this paper, we regard winter heating as a quasi-natural experiment to identify the possible causal effects of winter heating on air quality. The results suggest that the winter heating seriously deteriorated the air quality, and the negative shock of winter hearing on air quality presents obvious heterogeneous characteristics among different cities. Specifically, the adverse impacts of winter heating are more obvious among provincial capital cities and large cities than non-provincial capital cities, and small and medium-sized cities, respectively. In addition, our findings are relatively robust through performing different bandwidth tests, replacing the air quality indicators, and utilizing alternative empirical model.