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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (10 results)

  • Article
CUDARE Working Papers (2024)
This paper proposes that strong financial, judicial, and labor market institutions provide comparative advantage in clean industries, and thereby improve a country’s environmental quality. Five complementary tests support this hypothesis. First, industries that depend on institutions are disproportionately clean. Second, strong institutions increase relative exports in clean industries, even conditional on environmental regulation and factor endowments. Third, an industry’s complexity helps explain the link between institutions and clean goods. Fourth, a quantitative general equilibrium model indicates that strengthening a country’s institutions decreases its pollution through relocating dirty industries abroad, though increases pollution in other countries. Fifth, cross-country differences in the composition of output between clean and dirty industries explain more of the global distribution of emissions than differences in the techniques used for production do. The comparative advantage that strong institutions provide in clean industries gives one under-explored reason why developing countries have relatively high pollution levels.
    Cover page: Institutions, Comparative Advantage, and the Environment
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    CUDARE Working Papers (2020)
      Cover page: Energy Cost Pass-Through in U.S. Manufacturing: Estimates and Implications for Carbon Taxes
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      CUDARE Working Papers (2018)
      U.S. investment to decrease pollution in rivers, lakes, and other surface waters has exceeded $1.9 trillion since 1960, and has also exceeded the cost of most other U.S. environmental initiatives. These investments come both from the 1972 Clean Water Act and the largely voluntary efforts to control pollution from agriculture and urban runoff. This paper reviews the methods and conclusions of about 20 recent evaluations of these policies. Surprisingly, most analyses estimate that these policies’ benefits are much smaller than their costs; the benefit/cost ratio from the median study is 0.37. Yet existing evidence is limited and undercounts many types of benefits. We conclude that it is unclear whether many of these regulations truly fail a benefit/cost test or whether existing evidence understates their net benefits; we also describe specific questions that when answered would help eliminate this uncertainty.
        Cover page: The Low but Uncertain Measured Benefits of US Water Quality Policy
        • Article
        CUDARE Working Papers (2022)
        What is a feasible and efficient policy to regulate air pollution from vehicles? A Pigouvian tax is technologically infeasible. Most countries instead rely on exhaust standards that limit air pollution emissions per mile for new vehicles. We assess the effectiveness and efficiency of these standards, which are the centerpiece of US Clean Air Act regulation of transportation, and counterfactual policies. We show that the air pollution emissions per mile of new US vehicles has fallen spectacularly, by over 99 percent, since standards began in 1967. Several research designs with a half century of data suggest that exhaust standards have caused most of this decline. Yet exhaust standards are not cost-effective in part because they fail to encourage scrap of older vehicles, which account for the majority of emissions. To study counterfactual policies, we develop an analytical and a quantitative model of the vehicle fleet. Analysis of these models suggests that tighter exhaust standards increase social welfare and that increasing registration fees on dirty vehicles yields even larger gains by accelerating scrap, though both reforms have complex effects on inequality.
          Cover page: Regulating Untaxable Externalities: Are Vehicle Air Pollution Standards Effective and Efficient?
          • Article
          CUDARE Working Papers (2024)
          The quality and inequality of US drinking water investments have gained attention after recent environmental disasters in Flint, Michigan, and elsewhere. We compare the formula-based targeting of subsidized loans provided under the Safe Drinking Water Act with the targeting of congressional drinking water earmarks (``pork barrel'' spending).  Earmarks are often critiqued for potentially privileging wealthier and more politically connected communities. We find that earmarks target Black, Hispanic, and low-income communities, partly due to targeting water systems serving large populations. Earmark and loan targeting differ significantly across all the demographics we analyze. Compared to Safe Drinking Water Act loans, earmarks disproportionately target Hispanic communities but not Black or low-income communities.
            Cover page: Do Earmarks Target Low-Income and Minority Communities? Evidence from US Drinking Water
            • Article
            CUDARE Working Papers (2020)
            This paper documents a new fact, then analyzes its causes and consequences: in most countries, import tariffs and non-tariff barriers are substantially lower on dirty than on clean industries, where an industry’s “dirtiness” is defined as its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per dollar of output. This difference in trade policy creates a global implicit subsidy to CO2 emissions in internationally traded goods and so contributes to climate change. This global implicit subsidy to CO2 emissions totals several hundred billion dollars annually. The greater protection of downstream industries, which are relatively clean, substantially accounts for this pattern. The downstream pattern can be explained by theories where industries lobby for low tariffs on their inputs but final consumers are poorly organized. A quantitative general equilibrium model suggests that if countries applied similar trade policies to clean and dirty goods, global CO2 emissions would decrease and global real income would change little
              Cover page: The Environmental Bias of Trade Policy
              • Article
              • Peer Reviewed
              UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2017)
              The demand for air quality depends on health impacts and defensive investments, but little research assesses the empirical importance of defenses. A rich quasi-experiment suggests that the Nitrogen Oxides (NOx) Budget Program (NBP), a cap-and-trade market, decreased NOx emissions, ambient ozone concentrations, pharmaceutical expenditures, and mortality rates. The annual reductions in pharmaceutical purchases, a key defensive investment, and mortality are valued at about $800 million and $1.3 billion, respectively, suggesting that defenses are over one-third of willingness-to-pay for reductions in NOx emissions. Further, estimates indicate that the NBP's benefits easily exceed its costs and that NOx reductions have substantial benefits.
                Cover page: Defensive Investments and the Demand for Air Quality: Evidence from the NOx Budget Program
                • Thesis
                • Peer Reviewed
                UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2021)

                Effective, fair, and efficient policy designed to manage ecosystems requires that we quantify the benefits these systems provide to society – so that they can be weighed against the costs of environmental regulation. A large ecological literature documents how ecosystem loss and degradation affect environmental outcomes, but these changes are difficult to price because many of the societal benefits ecosystems provide lack a formal market and are therefore absent from society’s balance sheet. This dissertation aims to fill this knowledge gap by systematically evaluating the effects of changes in ecosystem conditions on human well-being. I focus on natural endowments that have plausibly large social values but face significant challenges to their persistence and health. The first two essays provide new estimates of how large-scale disturbances to forests and wetlands affect market and non-market outcomes. By quantifying the value of benefits that these ecosystems provide, my findings can assist decision makers in trading off the costs and benefits of environmental protection. To facilitate future research into the economic and social value of other natural resources, the final chapter of my dissertation develops a new research design to estimate causal effects in cross-sectional settings. I then demonstrate the efficacy and utility of this approach by providing new estimates for the effect of average climate and soil conditions on agricultural yields – relationships notoriously confounded by unobserved farmer and location characteristics but crucial for guiding economic and policy decisions.

                  • Article
                  • Peer Reviewed
                  UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2015)
                  This paper combines panel data on monthly mortality rates of US states and daily temperature variables for over a century (1900-2004) to explore the regional evolution of the temperature-mortality relationship and documents two key findings. First, the impact of extreme heat on mortality is notably smaller in states that more frequently experience extreme heat. Second, the difference in the heat-mortality relationship between hot and cold states declined over 1900-2004, though it persisted through 2004. Continuing differences in the mortality consequences of hot days suggests that health motivated adaptation to climate change may be slow and costly around the world.
                    Cover page: Convergence in Adaptation to Climate Change: Evidence from High Temperatures and Mortality, 1900–2004
                    • Article
                    • Peer Reviewed
                    UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2016)
                    This paper examines the temperature-mortality relationship over the course of the twentieth-century United States both for its own interest and to identify potentially useful adaptations for coming decades. There are three primary findings. First, the mortality impact of days with mean temperature exceeding 807F declined by 75 percent. Almost the entire decline occurred after 1960. Second, the diffusion of residential air conditioning explains essentially the entire decline in hot day–related fatalities. Third, using Dubin and McFadden’s discrete continuous model, the present value of US consumer surplus from the introduction of residential air conditioning is estimated to be $85– $185 billion (2012 dollars).
                      Cover page: Adapting to Climate Change: The Remarkable Decline in the US Temperature-Mortality Relationship over the Twentieth Century
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