Journal of Environmental Economics and Management最新文献

Does saving behavior reveal socially relevant intertemporal preferences? People concerned about the next generation as such might assign welfare weights on other dynasties. These concerns are captured in a model of saving by decomposing the present generation’s preference for the next into its dynastic and cross-dynastic components. With such preferences, saving for one’s descendants benefits present members of other dynasties if they also care cross-dynastically. These preference externalities imply that socially relevant intertemporal preferences cannot be inferred from saving behavior and that utility discount rates revealed by saving behavior should be lowered. The external effect of present saving also decreases over time, implying that intertemporal preferences inferred from saving behavior are time-inconsistent.

We investigate the effects of a climatic shock on individuals’ tax deduction and tax payable patterns, alongside their income dynamics. Using individual-level annual tax return data and exploiting the 2010–2011 Queensland Floods in Australia as a natural experiment, we find that the floods affect different income groups differently. They also lead to persistent higher tax deductions for high-income taxpayers. For the population at large, we detect spikes in certain tax deduction items that lasted longer than the income shock. Overall, our findings uncover discernible changes in tax deduction patterns following floods.

Finding ways to encourage collective action in contexts where only a minority adopts the desired behavior is central to solving many of today’s global environmental problems. We study how correcting people’s beliefs about social norms and behavioral trends encourages collective action in a setting where the desired behavior is not yet prevalent. In a field experiment, we test whether low sign-up rates for a recycling program in urban Peru can be increased by providing information (1) that most people regard participation in the program as important, i.e., on the “injunctive norm”, (2) on an increasing recent trend in sign-up rates. We find that the effectiveness of the treatments depends on people’s prior beliefs: Correcting inaccurate beliefs increases sign-up decisions significantly among people who either substantially underestimate the injunctive norm or who underestimate the positive trend. As this sub-group of people is in the minority in our set-up, we do not observe statistically significant average treatment effects. We further find that the effects of the treatments increase in the level of underestimation. Our evidence demonstrates that belief updating can be used effectively to encourage collective action where it is weak as long as a meaningful number of people underestimates the relevant trends and norms.

This study examines the effects of domestic environmental regulations on import activity. Using a panel of firm-product-level data and variations in regulatory stringency across products established by China’s Eleventh Five-Year Plan for Environmental Protection (covering 2006–2010), it reveals that tougher regulations on emission-intensive industries at home led to increases in downstream manufacturers’ imports of emission-intensive intermediate inputs. Specifically, a 1% increase in sulfur dioxide emission intensity resulted in a 0.026% increase in intermediate imports after the implementation of the regulation. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that, although the regulation increased emissions in source countries, it reduced global emissions of sulfur oxides and carbon dioxide. This is because the increases in imports caused by the regulation mainly came from countries with lower emission intensity than China. The regulation did not disproportionately increase imports from or emissions in developing countries.

Wholesale electricity prices can rapidly change in real-time, yet households usually face fixed-price electricity tariffs. In markets with large amounts of solar electricity generation, households that predominantly import energy in the daytime when wholesale prices are low implicitly cross-subsidize households with energy use that is more weighted to the higher-priced evening. We map substation data on electricity use to demographic data, to identify the household characteristics associated with this cross-subsidization in a high-solar setting. We find that households in areas with low house prices and high levels of renters are the net funders of this implicit subsidy. These households currently have the lowest average energy cost for retailers to service, and could be the greatest immediate beneficiaries if real-time retail tariffs are made available, before accounting for price-responsiveness. Finally, we present evidence that cross-subsidy magnitudes have grown significantly in recent years, coincident with rapid solar generator penetration.

The rapid expansion of pipelines during the U.S. shale oil and gas boom drew attention to the economic consequences of pipeline incidents. This study investigates the impacts of 426 gas distribution pipeline incidents on property values in the United States between 2010 and 2020. We find that only incidents that are both severe (involving explosion, ignition, or fatalities) and occurred on above-ground pipelines, which we define as high-profile incidents, have adverse effects on nearby property values, while other incidents have no measurable housing price effect. A difference-in-differences analysis finds that high-profile incidents significantly decrease property values within 1000 m by 8.2%, and the negative impact can persist for about eight years on average. Furthermore, we find a drop in transaction volume that lasts a short period after the incidents, suggesting an initial demand-side response. In contrast to the strong effects of pipeline incidents, we do not find statistically significant price effects from pipeline installation. We also demonstrate that there is substantial heterogeneity by the type of incident and that results based on studies of individual incidents should be generalized with caution.

The social cost of environmental hazards depends on the well-being impacts of both exposure and adaptation. While the monetary expenditure of adaptation is increasingly considered, little research assesses the social cost associated with non-market lifestyle adaptation. Based on a longitudinal database of 27 million exercise records of 243,395 Chinese residents, I present evidence that urbanites limit their outdoor physical exercise in response to air pollution. Employing imported pollution from upwind cities as instrumental variable, I estimate that heavy air pollution leads to a 28% reduction in urbanites’ outdoor exercise likelihood. Information plays a crucial role as behavioral moderator: (i) Outdoor exercise rate plummets at the “heavy pollution” threshold and during the issuance of alerts; (ii) Residents in well-educated neighborhoods exhibit more than double the responsiveness to air pollution and alerts due to their greater awareness of pollution-related health risks. I discuss the health costs associated with this adaptation behavior and policy implications.

We test the influence of environmental regulation (ER) on the location decision of cross-border Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As) for a large sample of countries, sectors, and years using a structural gravity model. Unlike other studies, our results confirm the pollution haven hypothesis according to which more stringent ER makes countries less attractive to foreign investors planning to invest through M&As, compared with domestic investors. Policies that set quantitative limits on emissions have similar discouraging effects on cross-border investment to taxes on emissions. We find no evidence that the impact could be stronger in dirty sectors than in clean sectors. The impact of ER differs depending on country type according to their level of development, reflecting the fact that investments in developed countries and BRICS respond to different motivations. In emerging countries, lax ER could attract significantly more inward M&As. In developed countries, ER has a less discouraging effect.

Governments monitor air quality for regulatory purposes and, more recently, to provide information so individuals can act to lower their exposure to air pollution. Recent developments in low-cost technologies have also led to private adoption of air-quality monitors that produce publicly accessible air-quality readings. We study the adoption of these private air-quality monitors. We find that shocks to air pollution from wildfire result in substantial adoption. We also find that additional private monitors are concentrated in white, wealthy, and politically liberal neighborhoods. In contrast, there is no evidence that pollution shocks lead to higher adoption in neighborhoods with lower pre-existing access to monitors, higher long-run pollution, or those with more vulnerable populations. Private provision increases inequality in the availability of localized air-quality information.