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 …