Journal of Environmental Economics and Management最新文献

This paper addresses econometric challenges arising in panel data analyses related to IPAT (environmental Impact of Population, Affluence and Technology) models and other applications typically characterized by a large-$N$ and large-$T$ structure. This poses specific econometric complexities due to nonstationarity and cross-sectional error correlation, potentially affecting consistent estimation and valid inference. We provide a concise overview of these complications and how to deal with these with appropriate tests and models. Moreover, we apply these insights to empirical examples based on the IPAT identity, offering insights into the robustness of previous findings. Our results suggest that using standard panel techniques can lead to biased estimates, incorrect inference, and invalid model adequacy tests. This can potentially lead to flawed policy conclusions. We provide practical guidance to practitioners for navigating these econometric issues.

China’s spatially discontinuous winter heating policy has been used to examine how sustained exposure to air pollution impacts health. This influential literature exploits quasi-experimental cross-sectional variation in atmospheric emissions in a geographically vast and populous nation. Our study introduces an alternative external definition of the winter heating boundary and takes advantage of an unprecedented expansion of pollution and mortality surveillance, covering at least 10 times more sites and finer-grained pollution particle sizes that are more relevant to health standards today. We estimate spatial discontinuities in pollution and mortality that shrink over time, consistent with tighter emissions regulations, higher quality medical care, and increased air quality disclosure to – and defensive behavior by – the public. We find that in 2013–2015 a 10-μg/m³ increase in PM2.5 raised behaviorally inclusive mortality for cardiovascular and respiratory causes by 11% (95% confidence interval = 2–20%) and lung cancer mortality by 20% (95% CI = 4–37%).

In this paper, we assess the effectiveness of early climate policy in emerging economies by causally evaluating the impact of China’s Low-carbon City Pilot (LCCP) on city-level per-capita CO${}_2$ emissions and CO${}_2$ intensity of GDP over the period 2003–2017. The idiosyncrasies of the policy design pose significant challenges for causal identification, which we overcome within a synthetic control framework. Contrary to previous contributions, our results suggest that the LCCP had no significant impact on either carbon emissions or intensity. The main takeaway of our empirical investigation is that even in emerging economies, effective environmental policy requires transparent, quantifiable targets, and credible enforcement.

Recent years have seen a growing interest among empiricists in exploiting random weather fluctuations to identify climate change impacts, yet a clear understanding of the conditions under which short-run weather effects can reveal long-run climatic impacts is lacking. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for weather fluctuations to systematically identify the marginal effect of climate on an economic outcome. Under these conditions, empirical estimates of local marginal weather effects flexibly trace out a common long-run response function to climate that can be used for non-marginal climate change counterfactuals. Our application considers the effect of weather on county-level agricultural GDP in the United States. Depending on model specification, agricultural GDP is predicted to decrease by 6%–10% under a 2 °C warming scenario.

Using a novel dataset of natural disasters affecting Italy from 2010 onward, we investigate the impact of hundreds of hydrogeological events on firms’ survival and performance. Despite being less extreme, these events are increasingly frequent and geographically widespread, this constituting a relevant but unexplored topic in the natural disasters literature. In order to assess the impact of multiple events occurred over several years, we implement a staggered difference-in-differences design that exploits the variation in the timing of the treatment. Our results show that hit firms have a 7.3% higher probability of exiting the market. Conditional on surviving, in the three years after the calamity, firms experience an average decline in their revenues and employment by −4.9% and −2.2%, respectively. These impacts are highest for micro-small, younger and low-tech firms.

I show how the exemption of small-scale emitting firms from emissions pricing results in within-country emissions leakage — an emissions price increase for the regulated firms prompts an increase in the emissions of the unregulated. I use a heterogeneous firm model in which a fixed share of firms is subject to emissions pricing. The firms at the lower part of the productivity distribution benefit from being exempted, such that the higher the emissions price, the more and dirtier firms can survive in the domestic market. Leakage is stronger if firms are exempted only if they emit less than a fixed threshold (as for the EU Emission Trading System) because some firms strategically bunch below the threshold, making the emissions price an even weaker tool to reduce total emissions. In environments with low social costs of emission or high fixed regulatory costs, an exemption may be justified; over time, however, the criteria for exemptions should be adjusted accordingly.

Conflicting societal goals can lead to national and local policies that are at odds with each other. National policies promoting the adoption of solar photovoltaics may be counteracted by local policies defining the aesthetics of the built environment. As solar photovoltaic energy approaches grid parity globally, non-pecuniary barriers to the adoption of this important renewable energy source become increasingly salient. Using a unique survey of municipalities regarding such building codes and administrative data on all solar installations in Germany, a leader in solar adoption, we document the impact that municipalities amending their building codes to restrict solar installations, often with an eye toward preserving the historical nature of the town, has on solar adoption. We find that municipalities that implement solar policies have 10.4 percent less solar photovoltaic capacity than municipalities in the control group. We confirm our results when applying spatial techniques and analyzing the impact of such policies on regulated areas within municipalities.

When environmental regulations do not explicitly target agriculture, it becomes difficult to predict if and how this sector will react. In this study, we delve into this issue by scrutinizing China's flagship program designed to control industrial sulfur dioxide emissions. We employ the difference-in-differences method to analyze extensive agricultural data, quantifying the policy's impact on agriculture from both the intensive and extensive margins. Our results indicate that the policy led to an approximately 9% increase in agricultural value added. This growth mainly stemmed from shifts in land allocation and subsequent changes in fertilizer use, rather than from crop yield improvements. Variations in composite grain yields occurred due to shifts in the crop mix, not from yield improvements in specific crops. Overall, our study found that the policy boosted rural per capita net income by 11.6%.

The objective of residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs is to increase environmentally friendly home renovations, like solar panel installations, for private residences by making financing more readily available. Local governments use municipal bond proceeds to finance PACE loans that are secured via a property tax lien on the affected residence and repaid through temporarily higher property taxes. Critics allege that these programs can stymy housing markets through lien-related risks that discourage buyers and lenders. Using data from Florida, we find support for these claims. Our analysis suggests that PACE program rollouts predict fewer home sales and weaker house price appreciation. We investigate the channel for these results and observe that mortgage lenders are less likely to approve loan applications in areas after local PACE programs are introduced. This even occurs for homes without PACE liens, which discourages housing market liquidity and drives down housing market returns. Our results emphasize the need for thoughtful policy design and implementation to avoid unintended, negative consequences of well-intentioned sustainability programs.