Journal of Environmental Economics and Management最新文献

This paper studies how centralizing environmental administration affects air pollution in China. China launched a reform in 2016 to empower upper-level environmental protection bureaus to administer lower-level bureaus vertically through personnel control. Exploiting a stacked difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the reform significantly reduced air pollution. The effect was stronger in places where pollution was less likely to be affected by spillovers from other provinces, where local governments initially paid less attention to environmental protection, and where there was less economic importance. Further analysis shows that the reform reduced pollution by strengthening the pollution reduction incentives of local environmental officials, increasing the intensity of local environmental inspection, and promoting environmental compliance by polluting firms.

Stated preference (SP) research on willingness to pay (WTP) for improvements to wildlife populations focuses almost universally on measures related to whether organisms live or die. Preferences for changes in non-lethal harm to wildlife are generally overlooked. To evaluate the consequences, this article develops a theoretical model and corresponding discrete choice experiment (DCE) to evaluate whether and how the omission of information on non-lethal wildlife harm influences WTP estimation, grounded in a case study of marine plastic reductions in the North Atlantic. The theoretical model suggests that when environmental programs have both lethal and non-lethal impacts on wild species, DCEs that omit information on the latter may not produce valid welfare measures. Empirical results show that the omission of this information has multiple impacts on welfare estimates, largely consistent with theoretical predictions. Results suggest that welfare estimates for wildlife improvements can be confounded by the omission of information on non-lethal harm from SP scenarios. Results also demonstrate the hazards of excluding potentially welfare-relevant information from SP scenarios when respondents might assume relationships between omitted information and other material included in the questionnaire.

Renewable energy can yield social benefits through local air quality improvements and their subsequent effects on human health. We estimate some of these benefits using data gathered during the rapid adoption of large-scale solar power generation in Chile over the last decade. Relying on exogenous variation from solar irradiation and incremental solar generation capacity over time, we find that solar energy displaces coal generation and curtails hospital admissions due to respiratory diseases. These effects are largely manifested in cities downwind of and near coal plants that are displaced by the introduction of new solar. The reduction in exposure to air pollution from these displaced coal plants seems to be driving this relationship. Our results help quantify the health benefits that can be achieved through greater renewable energy investments.

Migration is one measure that individuals can take to adjust to the adverse impacts of increasingly extreme weather that can arise from climate change. Using novel geo-referenced high-frequency data, we investigate the impact of soil moisture anomalies on migration within West Africa and towards Europe. We estimate that a standard deviation decrease in soil moisture leads to a 2-percentage point drop in the probability of international migration, equivalent to a 25 percent decrease in the number of international migrants. This effect is concentrated during the months that immediately follow the crop-growing season among areas in the middle of the income distribution. The findings suggest that weather anomalies negatively affect agricultural production, leading to liquidity constraints that prevent people from moving internationally.

This paper examines the impact of changes in the stringency of environmental regulations on productivity growth. We exploit several data sources, including the OECD Environmental Policy Stringency Index and balance sheet information from ORBIS and iBACH, to test the Porter hypothesis, according to which firms’ productivity can benefit from more stringent environmental policies. We estimate the regulatory impact over a five-year horizon using panel local projections. To identify the direction of the effects, we estimate ${\mathrm{CO}}_2$ equivalent emissions for all firms in our sample using a machine learning algorithm. As suggested by the country-level analysis and confirmed by the firm-level analysis, policy tightening negatively affects productivity growth of high-polluting firms and to a larger extent than that of their low-polluting peers. Hence, we do not find support for the Porter hypothesis in general. However, not all policies have the same impact – non-market based policies are the most detrimental to productivity growth – and not all highly polluting firms are affected in the same way – the negative impact is mitigated for large firms, which may benefit from easier access to finance and greater innovativeness.

We study the influence of industrial lobbying on national climate policies and the formation of an international environmental agreement if the coalition countries use border carbon adjustments to protect domestic producers. We find that the effects of this political influence crucially depend on the distribution of carbon tax revenues. If these are transferred to the households, lobbying distorts carbon taxes downwards to reduce the tax burden and does not affect coalition sizes. This leads to higher emissions and lower welfare. By contrast, if tax revenues are given back to the firms, lobbies in the outsider countries favor carbon taxes, whereas lobbies in the coalition countries favor carbon subsidies to raise the international commodity price. This reduces the tax difference and the welfare difference between the countries, which reduces the free-rider incentives. Then, lobbying stabilizes the grand coalition and reduces global emissions compared to a “perfect” world without lobbying if the political influence is sufficiently strong.

This paper estimates the impact of particulate matter pollutants, measured by $PM10$ levels, on public healthcare costs for youth and older adult populations using administrative data from two large UK hospitals and exploiting spatial and temporal variation in $PM10$ levels. We find that patient enrolment increases when their neighborhood experiences higher levels of $PM10$. Specifically, a standard deviation increase in $PM10$ levels increases the enrolment of patients aged 60 years and older by 6.2% and the enrolment of patients under 18 years of age by 3.1%. Using detailed costing information, we estimate that a standard deviation increase in $PM10$ increases public healthcare costs by $\pounds 873,985.20$ per year in the municipality studied.

Surface water supplies are becoming increasingly strained, pushing policy makers to find solutions to facilitate reductions in water use though there is limited evidence on how farmers respond to policy induced variation in surface water supplies. This paper uses a difference-in-differences framework to compare the response of farmers to a bundle of policies reducing deliveries from the Colorado River by 35%. I find that on average, farmers reduce the amount of land planted but plant more water intensive crops leading to a minimal reduction in total estimated water use compared to the counterfactual. Additionally, there is strong suggestive evidence that farmers are using groundwater to offset a significant amount of the surface water loss. These findings have important consequences for understanding the relative trade-offs policy makers face when implementing policies that protect surface water sources.

The timing of climate adaptation decisions can have substantial consequences for the assessment of climate damages. Since weather variability can create risks for natural resource management that differ across adaptation choices, such variability has the potential to alter the speed of climate adaptation. This paper estimates the effect of weather variability on the timing of adaptation decisions of forest landowners in the Eastern United States. A discrete-choice econometric model of forest management is estimated and used in a bio-economic simulation that shows how variability in cold temperatures can significantly slow the rate of adapting from cold-tolerant natural hardwood forests to cold-sensitive, but highly valuable pine plantations. The range of weather variability in climate projections and across the landscape generates large differences in adaptation timing. Ignoring projected future decreases in weather variability results in a large downward bias in estimating future paths of climate adaptation. Since pine plantations produce fewer non-market ecosystem services than natural hardwood forests, an important source of future conservation uncertainty is the economic response of private forest landowners to changing weather variability.

This paper examines the investment incentives of market-based regulation, focusing on the technology characteristics that different regulatory schemes tend to incentivize. The firms’ technology choice is socially optimal if and only if the aggregate emission allowance supply is completely inelastic. Furthermore, in the presence of uncertainty, elastic emission allowance supply, and strictly convex environmental damage, it is optimal to tax investments in technologies that induce a large variance in emissions. Lastly, price elastic supply of emission allowances may either increase or decrease the volatility in the product market, depending on the risk environment the firms face. The results indicate that introduction of permit price-stabilizing measures in an emission trading system will come at the cost of suboptimal technology investments, and may also lead to increased fluctuations in product prices.