Journal of Environmental Economics and Management最新文献

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.

Hypothetical Bias (HB) remains challenging for practitioners of stated preference approaches. One elusive idea is the extent to which country and culture may affect HB's magnitude and the efficacy of mitigation methods. This paper implements both real and hypothetical elicitation in the United States and China in the context of a field survey and experiment for battery recycling containers to establish the extent of HB. It compares multiple HB mitigation strategies, namely Cheap Talk, Ex Ante Consequentiality, and Certainty Follow-up in the two countries. Results show that a significant amount of actual HB exists. The ex ante methods are ineffective at reducing HB in both countries. The Certainty Follow-up method can be effective but can overcorrect, especially for the Chinese sample. Results also indicate that comparing the efficacy of different mitigation strategies based on only hypothetical scenarios (potential HB) across countries may lead to erroneous conclusions. This study calls for treating country and cultural differences more seriously when conducting international valuation work.

The use of anti-pollution facemasks (APFs) in defense against particulate matter (PM) pollution is subject to debate as air pollution and wildfire events intensify. Inward leakage due to imperfect fitting and the Peltzman effect of people spending more time outdoors when wearing masks have led to mixed evidence regarding the effectiveness of APFs, which in turn has contributed to conflicting public messages about APFs with potentially large public health costs. We conduct a large-scale randomized field study on individuals' daily outdoor time and mask wearing behaviors and the associated health outcomes during an entire winter heating season in a provincial capital city in Northeastern China. We find that APFs used in everyday life achieved an overall efficiency of 80% in reducing respiratory or cardiovascular disease related doctor visits. Mask wearing, due to its discomfort, reduced outdoor time. However, the added protection provided by masks against PM led respondents to spend more time outdoors on smog days, and this relative Peltzman effect wiped out about 12% of APFs' health benefits. Taken together, APFs’ health benefits far exceed their financial costs. These findings call for affirmatory but careful messaging to the public about using APFs as personal protection against PM pollution.

This paper examines how temperature affects worker productivity beyond the usual “on average” analysis, with a particular focus on distributional impacts of the increasing heat incidence across high- and low-productivity areas. Using a recentered influence function regression approach, we estimate unconditional reduced-form effects of a location shift in the temperature distribution—consistent with climate change trends—on the labor productivity distribution across counties in the contiguous U.S. We find that labor productivity is largely insensitive to changes in the frequency of cool-to-moderate maximum daily temperatures. However, as temperatures shift above $24^{\circ }\text{C}$, the effects on productivity turn increasingly negative, albeit with their magnitudes attenuating as a county’s productivity rank rises. While highly productive locations in the top 5% are not adversely impacted even by the hottest temperatures, permanently increasing the incidence of $\ge 36^{\circ }\text{C}$ temperatures just by a day lowers productivity at the bottom vigintile by a nontrivial 0.22% per year, an equivalent of 10.5 hours of work by a minimum-wage worker. As temperatures continue to rise, not only does worker productivity worsen on average, but the cross-county dispersion therein widens too. Given existing climate forecasts, we predict that future extreme temperatures would further deepen worker productivity inequality.

We present a formal model that analyzes the trade-offs between environmental policy and economic growth in a developing economy. The adoption of restrictive environmental policies limits the use of abundant fossil energy resources, which may slow down economic development and thus violate the Right-to-Development. If faster economic growth allows a country to grow out of pollution sooner, less stringent policies are good for growth and even for the environment, having adopted a long-term horizon. Accounting for a ceiling on cumulative emissions can reinforce the argument by providing an additional rationale to phase out pollution. One assumption is crucial for the argument to hold: polluting fossil energy is an essential input over the early phase of economic development, but not in the later phases. Such a discontinuity could result from structural change. We provide empirical evidence for the plausibility of a discontinuity in the elasticity of carbon dioxide emissions with respect to aggregate output, using cross country data, even if it does not appear to be as strong as assumed in the model economy.

Our understanding of individuals’ response to information about unregulated contaminants is limited. We leverage the highly publicized social discovery of unregulated PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) contamination in public drinking water to study the impact of information about unregulated contaminants on housing prices. Using residential property transaction data, we employ a difference-in-differences research design and show that high profile media coverage about PFAS contamination significantly decreased property values of affected homes. We also find suggestive evidence of residential sorting that may have worsened environmental inequality.

Plastic waste trade has grown considerably in the last decades and has led to severe environmental problems in recipient countries. Being the largest recipient, China has permanently banned the imports of plastic waste since 2018. This paper examines the causal effect of plastic waste imports on air pollution by exploiting China’s experience of importing plastic waste and the recent import ban. By combining data on plastic waste imports with PM_2.5 data at the city level for the years 2000–2011, we find that plastic waste imports increased PM_2.5 density significantly in recipient cities. To evaluate the impact of the import ban on air quality, we employ daily data on air pollution between 2015 and 2020. Our difference-in-differences results show that affected cities, relative to other cities, experienced considerable improvement in air quality following the ban. Further analysis reveals that increased incineration of non-recycled waste is the main channel. These findings provide insights into the costs of importing plastic waste and the potential environmental gains from banning such imports in other countries.

Economists tend to view a uniform emissions price as the most cost-effective approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This paper scrutinizes the assumptions in general equilibrium which underlie the established view that uniform emissions pricing is optimal, focusing on economies where society values the well-being of future generations more than private actors. When social and private discount rates differ, we show that a uniform carbon price is optimal only under restrictive assumptions about technology homogeneity and intertemporal decision-making. Non-uniform pricing spurs capital accumulation and benefits future generations. Depending on sectoral heterogeneity in the substitutability between capital and energy inputs, we find that optimal carbon prices differ widely across sectors and yield substantial welfare gains relative to uniform pricing. Realizing these welfare gains, however, requires that the regulator has information on the technology heterogeneity across sectors. Differentiated carbon pricing based on imperfect estimates of technology heterogeneity can yield significant welfare losses.

We build a theoretical model of optimal, closed-economy growth of production and consumption, including inputs of human and knowledge capital and growing natural resources, and give two calibrations of it to the global economy's approximately exponential growth during 1995–2014. We thereby show that the World Bank's Adjusted Net Savings (ANS) measure of an economy's sustainability, which has some practical and theoretical advantages over change in wealth, the Bank's preferred measure, ideally needs further adjusting. Our model includes omitted or undervalued estimates of the benefits of human and knowledge capital investment, net resource growth, and productivity growth, and the cost of capitals dilution by population growth. Together these raise estimated, global ANS about 10 percentage points above the Bank's estimate, to equal their growth rate times total wealth, but our adjustments could be negative overall for some countries. By reclassifying about 18% of output from consumption to human and knowledge capital investments, our second calibration needs only 0.3 %/yr of exogenous productivity growth to explain global consumption growth observed during 1995–2014. Though our model omits environmental costs and thus ignores long-run sustainability issues, our adjustments suggest desirable though difficult changes that could improve World Bank ANS as a comparative sustainability indicator.

This study examines strategic interactions between cross-ownership and managerial delegation contracts with environmental corporate social responsibility (ECSR) incentives in a mixed oligopoly. We find that private firms always utilize ECSR incentives in competing prices under cross-ownership, whereas public managers do so only when there is severe environmental damage. We also demonstrate that the ECSR incentives for welfare-weighted public managers are always lower than for their profit-weighted counterparts when they employ ECSR incentives, which leads to lower environmental damage and greater social welfare. Finally, we show that welfare-weighted public delegation increases the private firm's ECSR compared to no public delegation, which is reversed in the profit-weighted variant. Our findings suggest that the government should design an environmental incentive scheme to their public managers that can also induce private managers to behave more aggressively in abatement activities as the degree of cross-ownership increases.