Journal of Environmental Economics and Management最新文献

We study the causal relationship between air pollution and dementia prevalence. Leveraging the strict air pollution regulations implemented during the 2008 Beijing Olympics and employing a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences (SDID) approach, we find that a 1 $\mu {\mathrm{g/m}}^3$ decrease in annual PM₁₀ levels corresponds to a 0.82 percentage point reduction in dementia prevalence (equivalent to 2.39% of the mean). Analyses across demographics show a more pronounced impact on vulnerable groups. Moreover, an economic assessment suggests that a 10 $\mu {\mathrm{g/m}}^3$ reduction in China’s air pollution in 2010 could generate up to 2.36 billion US dollars in benefits due to a lower dementia prevalence. These results highlight the potential public health gains achievable through air pollution regulations.

Tax aversion makes it politically challenging to introduce Pigouvian taxes. One proposed solution to overcome this resistance is to package policies. Using an online lab experiment, we investigate whether combining a tax and a subsidy is perceived as more acceptable than the tax or the subsidy alone. The purpose of the policies is to reduce demand for a good with a negative externality to the socially optimal level. We find that support for a combination of a tax and a subsidy equals the simple average of support for the two instruments alone. Combining a tax and a subsidy therefore does not reduce tax aversion. We examine potential mechanisms behind the tax aversion. Participants believe they will receive a lower share of the tax revenue when the tax is implemented alone than when it is combined with a subsidy, i.e. the participants in the tax alone group hold more pessimistic beliefs about the tax revenue. We also find that the participants expect the tax to be more effective in reducing demand for the good with a negative externality than both the subsidy alone and the combinations of tax and subsidy. This belief does not, however, translate into support for the tax.

Nearly a decade after the 2015 emissions scandal, Volkswagen has transitioned from marketing deceptive ‘clean engine cars’ to becoming a major player in the electrification of the automotive industry. Yet, the violation of environmental standards during the scandal resulted in excessive pollutant emissions, posing persistent threats to health and the environment. This paper explores how consumers held Volkswagen accountable for these hazards. Our analysis reveals that the decline in Volkswagen’s sales volumes following the scandal was driven by environmentally concerned consumers globally. However, their reaction was short-lived and mainly limited to the models implicated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Interestingly, we find no evidence of lost sales to competitors. Instead, we document a within-brand or within-group shift in favor of Volkswagen models compliant with environmental regulations. This phenomenon could be one of the contributing factors explaining Volkswagen’s resilience in navigating the fallout from the scandal.

We investigate the medium-term health effects of prenatal exposure to moderate air pollution by matching satellite $P{M}_{10}$ concentration estimates with longitudinal data on hospitalisations and filled prescriptions for the universe of live births in a large Italian region. We employ exogenous variation in $P{M}_{10}$ in a multiple fixed-effects model to show that prenatal exposure to pollution leads to worse birth outcomes and to more hospitalisations and filled prescriptions in the first 10 years of life, especially at the bottom health quantiles. We use these estimates to quantify the monetary cost of prenatal exposure to air pollution.

We use worldwide gridded satellite data to analyse how population size and density affect urban ${\mathrm{PM}}_{2.5}$ pollution. We find that more populated and denser grid cells are more exposed to pollution. However, across urban areas, exposure increases with cities’ population size but decreases with density. Moreover, the population effect is driven mostly by population commuting to core cities rather than the core city population itself. We analyse heterogeneity by geography and income levels. A counterfactual simulation shows that ${\mathrm{PM}}_{2.5}$ exposure could fall by up to 40% if population size were equalized across all cities within countries, but the relocation of population from large to small cities that maximizes welfare would be small.

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.