IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp14957.html

Do Economic Incentives Promote Physical Activity? Evidence from the London Congestion Charge

Author

Listed:
  • Nakamura, Ryota

    (Hitotsubashi University)

  • Albanese, Andrea

    (LISER)

  • Coombes, Emma

    (University of East Anglia)

  • Suhrcke, Marc

    (University of York)

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of economic incentives on travel-related physical activity, leveraging the London Congestion Charge's disincentivising of sedentary travel modes via increasing the cost of private car use within Central London. The scheme imposes charges on most types of cars entering, exiting and operating within the Central London area, while individuals living inside the charging zone are eligible for a 90% reduction in congestion charges. Geographical location information provides the full-digit postcode data necessary to precisely identify the eligibility for the discount of participants in the London Travel Demand Survey for the period 2005–2011. Using a boundary regression-discontinuity design reveals a statistically significant but small impact on active commuting (i.e. cycling and walking) around the border of the charging zone. The effect is larger for lower-income households and car owners. The findings are robust against multiple specifications and validation tests.

Suggested Citation

  • Nakamura, Ryota & Albanese, Andrea & Coombes, Emma & Suhrcke, Marc, 2021. "Do Economic Incentives Promote Physical Activity? Evidence from the London Congestion Charge," IZA Discussion Papers 14957, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14957
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp14957.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Krekel, Christian & Kavetsos, Georgios & Ziebarth, Nicolas R., 2025. "Passing on the flame: Do mega sports events promote health behaviours?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 377(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D04 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Policy: Formulation; Implementation; Evaluation
    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior
    • R48 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Transportation Economics - - - Government Pricing and Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14957. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Holger Hinte (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.