Journal of Environmental Economics and Management最新文献

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.

Policymakers and firms use behavioral interventions to promote sustainable development in various domains. A correct impact evaluation requires looking beyond the targeted domain and assessing its interactions with similar interventions. Existing evidence in this area is limited, leading to potential misestimation of behavioural interventions and poor guidance on their design. Here, we test the impact of a two-year social information campaign to nudge water conservation through a large-scale randomized controlled trial implemented with a multi-resource company,. We find that the water nudge significantly decreases water and electricity usage, but not that of gas. Spillovers arise for customers who do not receive nudges targeting the other resources. Customers receiving the water report are also significantly less likely to deactivate their gas and electricity contracts, regardless of whether they receive other reports. Our results suggest that multiple nudges strain users’ limited attention and ability to enact conservation efforts. Users’ constraints in attending to multiple stimuli need to be accounted in designing policy interventions to foster sustainable practices.

Li and Pizer derived upper and lower bounds on the time-dependent social discount rate that both converge in the long run to the consumption rate of interest. They went on to recommend using the consumption rate of interest as the social discount rate for investments relating to climate change for which the bulk of the benefits accrue in the far future. However, the bounds can be quite wide in the short-run, providing little guidance for shorter term discounting. Here, we show that if uncertainty in the social discount rate is encoded in a uniform distribution, then its expected value converges much more rapidly to the consumption rate of interest. The implications of this for project evaluation are more complicated than in the deterministic case considered by Li and Pizer.

This study examines the influence of relative energy prices on the geographical distribution of industrial investments across 41 countries. Employing a gravity model framework to analyse firms’ investment location decisions, we estimate the model using global bilateral investment flows derived from firm-level M&A data. Our findings reveal that a 10% increase in the energy price differential between two countries results in a 3.2% rise in cross-border acquisitions. This effect is most pronounced in energy-intensive industries and transactions targeting emerging economies. Furthermore, policy simulations suggest that the impact of unilateral carbon pricing on cross-border investments is modest.

While tenure security is essential to effective land management, there is little empirical evidence on its environmental impact. Exploiting the staggered rollout of the land registry program across Greece, we find the regions covered by the mandatory program witness large declines in agricultural fire events, burned areas, and air pollutants. Agricultural data reveal that landowners in those regions mitigate fire risks through reducing stubble burning, expanding farming areas, and stocking more fire-suppression equipment. Our findings indicate that strengthening property rights can lead to more sustainable farming practices and promote long-term land investment, thereby reducing fire hazards.

Hydrogen produced from renewable energy and other carbon-neutral sources has the potential of becoming an important medium for storing and transporting energy, partially taking on the role that fossil fuels play to date. We develop a novel theoretical and empirical model of sequential trade based on long-term contracts with one or more fixed-capacity projects entering each period in a modified Nash-Cournot competition. We simulate the emerging international trade in hydrogen using calibrated demand, supply, transportation, and policy data, exploring a set of scenarios to determine which factors have significant influence—in particular environmental, innovation, and trade policies. Our findings suggest that hydrogen trade exhibits significant price dispersion and two-way trade as vintages of contracts overlap in a market defined by endogenous innovation and policy interventions. Trade costs and the mode of transportation (pipelines or ammonia conversion, possibly others) play a pivotal role and influence the relative share of hydrogen production types (green, blue, or turquoise). Trade policies emerge as a more essential determinant of hydrogen trade than carbon and innovation policies.

This paper investigates the relationship between climate change and income inequality, recognizing that the economic impacts of climate change are not uniform across different levels of income within and across countries. Using methods from the existing literature on climate and economic growth, we analyze the economic impact of rising temperatures by within-country income decile. Our findings suggest that climate change disproportionately affects the poorer segments of the population within countries, even after accounting for a country’s ability to adapt to climate impacts, while richer households suffer lower damages. In the reference scenario without additional climate action (3.6°C warming), we estimate that climate impacts could lead to an increase in the Gini index by up to six percentage points, notably in Sub-Saharan Africa. We project impacts to 2100 through the RICE50+ model and estimate the income elasticity of impacts within countries. Our estimates indicate that climate change damages are regressive, with an income elasticity of damages of 0.6 under our preferred specification. On the other hand, climate benefits are approximately distribution-neutral or slightly progressive.