The Impacts of Air Quality Critical Episodes: Evidence from Santiago

We document that lower-income individuals in Santiago, Chile are exposed to higher concentrations of PM10 and PM2.5 while at home and when taking into ac-count their locations throughout the entire day. The exposure gradient across income deciles when assuming individuals are at their residence 24 hours a day is similar to that when considering their location at each hour of the day as reported on the reference day in an origin-destination survey. We use a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to explore the effect of the declaration of critical air quality episodes, which activate city-wide restrictions on private vehicles among others, on air pollution concentrations. We find that the declaration of critical air quality episodes leads to small and mostly statistically insignificant decreases in air pollution overall but the effects vary considerably across monitoring stations and hours of the day.