Journal of Environmental Economics and Management最新文献

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.

Payment for ecosystem services (PES) program contracts include penalties for non-performance to ensure that these programs receive the environmental benefits they have been paying for. The standard penalty structure in PES programs requires participants to pay back all program payments received if the contract is terminated before the end of the contract lifetime. We derive the optimal non-completion penalty structure, which decouples the penalty from payments received. In contrast to the backward-looking standard penalty, the optimal penalty is forward-looking and equals the principal's net future environmental benefits lost due to contract non-completion. The optimal penalty thus falls over the life of the contract, in contrast to the standard penalty, which rises over the life of the contract. A numerical policy simulation with heterogeneous agents based on features in federal agricultural conservation programs in the United States suggests that the optimal penalty structure can increase realized net environmental benefits significantly. Our results suggest that performance of most kinds of PES programs can be enhanced by decoupling non-completion penalties from payments and by adjusting how penalties vary over contract lifetimes.

We study the effect of an employer’s communication concerning energy-efficient behavior on a firm’s employees’ behavioral responses. The management aims to enhance energy-efficient behavior performance by irregularly sending online messages to remote employees. We break down each message, analyzing the positive or negative emotions conveyed, collective or individual orientation, and ease of language. Comparing employees’ daily energy efficiency after receiving a message to their daily performance without a previous message, we find that messages generally result in an immediate increase in efficiency. Messages conveying negative emotions and those making a distinction between the manager and the employees have a smaller effect than messages conveying positive emotions and emphasizing a collective orientation that includes both the management and employees. Additionally, shorter messages are more likely to induce improved efficiency. Sending messages significantly impacts driver performance for up to six days after the message, resulting in economically relevant cost reductions.

The degree of substitutability between clean and dirty energy plays a central role in leading economic analyses of optimal environmental policy. Despite the importance, assuming a constant and exogenous elasticity of substitution has been a dominant theoretical approach. We challenge this assumption by developing a dynamic general equilibrium model with an endogenous elasticity of substitution that interacts with the relative share of clean inputs in the economy. We find strong dynamic feedback effects arising from endogenous substitution capacity that amplifies the impact of directed technical change and accelerates the transition to a green economy.

This paper evaluates the bioeconomic performance of individual fishing quota (IFQ) regulations in multiple-species fisheries. In our model, a manager chooses the aggregate quotas under uncertainty over the true stock abundances of two jointly-harvested fish species. Fishers conduct harvest operations under full knowledge of the species-specific productivities of fishing gear. We derive the profit maximizing fishing mortality and economic rent outcomes implemented by fishers under various regulatory designs. We compare bioeconomic performance of an IFQ regulation with discretion over the mix of harvested species against an IFQ regulation that bans at-sea discarding. Both regulations eliminate discards. Discretion allows closer alignment between fisher implemented outcomes and those that maximize long term expected fishery value. Incorporating discretion into regulatory designs provides new prospects for improving fisheries management.

Carbon capture and storage in salt domes or in inactive fields is seen as an appealing option to meet the ambitious objectives of the Paris Agreement. Captured CO${}_2$ emissions can also be injected in active fields to enhance gas or oil recovery. We examine the optimal scale and timing of these different capturing and storage options in a dynamic model of an economy subject to a carbon budget. We consider the socially optimal outcome as well as the outcome under laissez-faire. The social optimum can have different forms depending on the initial carbon budget, the fossil fuel resource stock and the stock of already injected CO${}_2$ in active fields. The level and convexity of the costs of capturing, storing and producing renewable energy plays a role as well. We specify the conditions under which each possible sequence of regimes – no capturing, only enhanced recovery, only storage without enhanced recovery, a combination of both or only renewables – occurs. We quantify our analytical results by calibrating the model and running simulations.

“Tipping points” for dangerous climate damages can transform climate protection into a coordination problem. If the location of the threshold is known, Nash equilibria exist in which the catastrophe is averted even without a climate agreement. However, there usually exists also an equilibrium in which no country exerts effort to prevent it, and the catastrophe occurs. We model equilibrium selection among non-cooperative countries with the help of an external randomization device, and analyze how it affects coalition formation. We find that results are much more nuanced than in the case where non-cooperative countries always coordinate on preventing the catastrophe. In some cases, a “coalition of free-riders” forms that is detrimental to welfare. In other cases, a “threshold equilibrium” emerges in which coalition members commit to do more than the outsiders, and the coalition is just large enough to become active. The grand coalition is also an equilibrium outcome, but is often unstable towards deviations by groups of countries.