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on Resource Economics |
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Issue of 2015‒08‒01
five papers chosen by |
| By: | Stark, Camila; Khanna, Madhu; Bi, Xiang |
| Abstract: | One dominant argument against environmental regulations is that the regulations will increase costs to facilities, causing the facilities to lay-off their workers. However, there are several ways facilities can respond to regulatory and community pressures to increase environmental performance. The facility could reduce its emissions of toxic chemicals by preventing pollution at the beginning of the process, controlling pollution by recycling or treating chemicals, or controlling pollution using end of pipe techniques. Furthermore, these responses can affect employment in different ways, depending on whether abatement activities require more or less labor and their effect on the scale of output. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of facilities’ voluntary reductions in toxic emissions on their level of employment by estimating the level pollution control and employment as a simultaneous decision made by facilities. We compare the different methods facilities use to reduce their emissions and how these methods affect facility-level employment. We apply a 3SLS model to panel data from the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory and a unique facility-level dataset, which includes facility-level characteristic data on over 10,000 establishments across the United States over 15 years, from 1995 to 2011. Our results show that reductions in toxic releases had a statistically significant negative impact on employment. However, if the facility reduces emissions using prevent pollution methods through reducing emissions per unit of sales, then the facility will reduce less employment than if the facility reduced pollution using end of pipe pollution control methods. These effects are similar if the facility is reducing regulated emission as well as non-regulated emissions. |
| Keywords: | Environmental economics, Employment, Toxic Release Inventory, Environmental Economics and Policy, Q52, Q58, |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea15:205560&r=res |
| By: | Pena-Levano, Luis M.; Taheripour, Farzad; Tyner, Wallace E. |
| Keywords: | Forest carbon sequestration, Emissions, General Equilibrium, climate change, crop yield, Crop Production/Industries, Environmental Economics and Policy, International Relations/Trade, Land Economics/Use, Q15, R52, Q54, |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea15:205629&r=res |
| By: | Stranlund, John K.; Son, Insung |
| Abstract: | We investigate the optimal regulation of a pollutant given its interaction with another controlled pollutant under asymmetric information about firms’ abatement costs. The co-pollutant is regulated, but perhaps not efficiently. Our focus is on optimal instrument choice in this setting, and we derive rules for determining whether a pollutant should be regulated with an emissions tax, tradable permits, or a hybrid price and quantity policy, given the regulation of its co-pollutant. The policy choices depend on the relative slopes of the damage functions for both pollutants and the aggregate marginal abatement cost function, including whether the pollutants are complements or substitutes in abatement and whether the co-pollutant is controlled with a tax or tradable permits. |
| Keywords: | Emissions trading, emissions taxes, cap-and-trade, uncertainty, price controls, hybrid policies, prices vs. quantities, Environmental Economics and Policy, L51, Q58, |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea15:205422&r=res |
| By: | Paudel, Krishna P.; Lin, C.-Y. Cynthia; Pandit, Mahesh |
| Abstract: | We examine the relationship between income and water pollutants using country-level global water quality data over the period 1980 to 2012. We include civil liberties and political rights in addition to income as explanatory variables. We use recent advances in econometric techniques to address the inclusion of continuous and discrete variables in nonparametric instrumental variable regression models. Results indicate an inverted U-shape relationship between income and pollution for one pollutant (lead) and a cubic shape for three pollutants (nickel, mercury and arsenic). In general, we find that improved civil liberties and political rights are correlated with better water quality. By estimating a nonparametric relationship between political variables and pollution and by accounting for the categorical nature of the political variables, we are able to detect a nonlinear relationship between political variables and pollution, which for some pollutants is an inverted U-shaped curve. |
| Keywords: | Binary variable, environmental Kuznets curve, nonparametric instrumental variable regressions, water pollution, Environmental Economics and Policy, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, Q53, C14, |
| Date: | 2014–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:saea14:162618&r=res |
| By: | Legras, Sophie; Martin, Elsa; Piguet, Virginie |
| Keywords: | Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use, |
| Date: | 2015–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea15:206391&r=res |