Journal of Environmental Economics and Management最新文献

Finland introduced the planet’s first carbon tax in 1990 to experiment with, to most economists, the best policy to reverse carbon emissions. I estimate the causal effect of taxing carbon on Finnish emissions using the Synthetic Control Approach (Abadie, 2021). The results suggest that taxing carbon reduces emissions by big margins. Finnish emissions are 16% lower in 1995, 25% lower in 2000, and 30% lower in 2004 than emissions in the counterfactual consistent with carbon taxes whose value increasing by 20 fold in 1990–2005. The estimates suggest that the carbon tax’s abatement elasticity is about 9%.

The paper develops the concept of “Economic Pathways” (EPs), which characterizes theory-based scenarios for an economy that strives for decarbonization by the middle of the century. The theoretical framework derives closed-form analytical solutions for consumption, innovation, emissions, and population. The EPs differ in the stringency of assumed policies and associated income and emission development. Unlike the well-known “Shared Socioeconomic Pathways”, they allow the inclusion of important causalities between the economy and the environment and thereby considerably narrow down the scope of likely future developments. The quantitative part serves to illustrate the long-term consequences of climate policy. I show that deep decarbonization only moderately delays economic development, but requires increasing escalation of the carbon price. The paper argues that the adoption of more stringent climate policies becomes more likely as the phase-out of fossil fuels increases. The “Green Road” is not only feasible but also attractive and realistic.

Pro-poor policies can have economic benefits, but they may also have environmental costs. This paper examines the impact of China's “E-commerce into Countryside” project (the ECC project), one of the world's largest targeted poverty alleviation strategies, on local air quality. The project covers approximately 100 million poor people. Using a set of difference-in-differences identification strategies, we find that the pro-poor ECC policy has consistently and significantly contributed to local air pollution, despite its role in fighting poverty. The decline in local air quality is primarily caused by the increase in rural enterprises, destruction of vegetation, and traffic pollution resulting from the intention to sell more agricultural products to the city. Pro-poor policymakers face the challenge of balancing poverty reduction with environmental protection during the process of sustainable development. When making policy decisions, it is important to consider local environmental regulations, ecological vulnerability, and potential adaptation strategies in order to weigh economic benefits against environmental costs.

This study presents new causal evidence on how urban heat contributes to sorting within a city. We estimate a discrete choice residential sorting model that includes census-tract fixed effects and controls for open space and green coverage to analyze how differences in urban heat at the census-tract level influence the location choices of New York City homeowners given their race, ethnicity, and income. Our results show clear patterns of residential sorting, with whites and high-income households outcompeting other racial/ethnic groups and low-income households for housing in cooler neighborhoods. Our counterfactual exercise, inspired by Cool Neighborhoods NYC, reveals that heat-mitigation policies can make poorer and minority households, on average, worse off. These findings are striking, considering that such programs often aim to enhance welfare in heat-exposed neighborhoods predominantly inhabited by low-income and minority households.

The impacts of climate change will depend on how human societies adapt to higher temperatures. In this study we report empirical evidence suggesting that people living in warmer places prefer a higher temperature for their recreational outdoor activities. To arrive at this conclusion we examine a novel global dataset of mobile phone usage in parks in more than 2500 locations across 77 countries. We examine this dataset with econometric methods to identify the relationship between outdoor recreation and temperature from daily variation in weather. Overall we find that for every increase in annual mean temperature by 1 degree Celsius, the preferred daily mean temperature for outdoor activity increases by about 0.5 degrees Celsius. We explain how these results can be interpreted as evidence for partial adaptation. We also illustrate how ignoring adaptation can bias projections of future responses to climate change.

This article uses satellite data to estimate the effectiveness of government protection on forested land across the globe over 2000–2022. Since deforestation can have significant negative externalities, measuring the effectiveness of protected areas is important for the future of conservation. It uses a regression discontinuity design at the boundaries of protected forest to counter the fact that protection is not randomly assigned. It estimates that protected areas are 30% effective on average, with significant heterogeneity between countries. Many countries with significant forest have extremely ineffective protection, such as Indonesia, the DRC, and Bolivia, suggesting that improvements to the quality of protection are just as important as the quantity of protected areas to conserve biodiversity.

This paper examines how different types of eco-innovation activities affect firms’ employment patterns. Using a linked employer–employee administrative dataset for the Netherlands we take an individual level task-based approach to differentiate between green and non-green jobs within firms. Our results show that while eco-innovation does not impact overall employment, eco-product innovation does lead to a 19.72% increase in green jobs. The growth in green jobs mainly comes from a compositional shift towards a small yet significant increase in green workers and reduction in non-green workers. Further analysis suggests that firms that voluntarily undertake eco-innovation create more green jobs but also that it is subsidy-driven policies rather than stricter regulations that drives the increase in green employment.

We use a randomized controlled trial in Bangladesh to test three types of non-price energy conservation strategies that influence electricity consumption of households: (i) advice on electricity conservation methods (knowledge treatment); (ii) (median) electricity consumption of others in the suburb (suburb comparison); and (iii) (median) electricity consumption of neighbors (neighbor comparison). We find that providing advice on saving energy could reduce households' electricity consumption and bills significantly. The effects are stronger for advice on electricity conservation methods than neighbor and suburb comparisons. The effects of providing information about own electricity consumption relative to neighbors’ electricity consumption is similar to the effects of giving information about own electricity consumption relative to electricity consumption of households in the same suburb. The effects among households who were inefficient users in neighbor and suburb comparison groups are almost as strong as those in the knowledge treatment group. The effects across all treatment groups become stronger over time as they receive repeated information.

Migration of U.S. residents across counties impacts energy consumption and, as a result, the environment. This paper leverages county-level migration data, structural energy consumption estimation techniques, and the AP3 environmental damage model to estimate the emissions impact of migration by county over time. Migration is found to have reduced U.S. environmental damage by $213 billion over the period 1991–2019, with average annual environmental benefits of $15 billion in the 1990s but -$2 billion in the 2010s. The paper also finds a significant reduction in the cost of emissions from energy consumption over time. (JEL Q51, Q56, J11, R23, Q48)

We price the transboundary externality of mobile public bads such as diseases and invasive species. We focus on the marginal cost to country B of an increase in the stock (i.e. an “outbreak”) in country A. These cross-jurisdiction marginal costs depend not only on economic, ecological, and spatial features of both jurisdictions but also on jurisdictions’ strategic reactions to the outbreak. Using a spatial dynamic game, we calculate the “cross-jurisdiction shadow costs” of an outbreak of mobile public bad under the Markov-perfect Nash equilibrium of control efforts. We find that under reasonable conditions, the source country has private incentives to control the outbreak itself, which can lead to a situation where the cross-jurisdiction shadow cost is, in fact, zero. We also derive conditions where a country optimally fails to control the outbreak (for example, damages in that country are small), in which case cross-jurisdiction shadow costs are positive. Finally, we note that since cooperative control of the mobile public bad delivers substantially higher welfare than non-cooperative control, we derive an externality pricing instrument that perfectly internalizes the externality and induces cooperative control among all countries.