Phase effect of the optical duobinary (ODB) modulation on the chromatic dispersion (CD) tolerance is more important than the ODB modulation-induced bandwidth effect. To show this, we evaluate, respectively, the filter bandwidth effect and the phase effect of the partial bit delay correlative modulation (PBDCM) on the CD tolerance. Due to the cancellation between the CD-induced and the PBDCM-induced phase effects, the PBDCM method can increase the CD-limited transmission to 2 ??? 3 times of that using standard 1-bit delay modulation, while the optimized filter bandwidth method can increase the transmission by 50% or less, depending on the input signal format. The PBDCM can be physically realized by adjusting the delay time of the delay-and-add circuit in the conventional duobinary transmitter (without lower-pass filter). These conclusions are also valid for systems having non-negligible polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) and polarization dependent loss (PDL).