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| Author | : Nathaly Macarena Rivera Casanoba |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 183 |
| Release | : 2018 |
| Genre | : Electronic dissertations |
| ISBN | : 9780438313095 |
| Author | : Laura Policardo |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : |
| Release | : 2011 |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : |
| Author | : Zihan Zhuo |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 0 |
| Release | : 2020 |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : |
The dissertation studies three seemly independent topics on environmental economics, but they share the same theme: the reactions of local governments and firms on promotional incentives and environmental regulations in China.The first chapter examines whether China's Two Control Zone policy has successfully shifted the relative share of SO2 emissions from control zones to non-control zone areas. With a difference-in-differences framework, I find that although the policy failed to achieve its total emission control targets, it caused a partial shifting of SO2 emissions and industrial output from control zones to non-control zone areas and promoted economic growth in relatively less industrialized, less populated, and less developed counties at a cost of higher environmental health damage within those areas. Estimations from this paper suggest that the policy caused the firms in control zone areas to produce 23% less SO2 emission than those in non-control zone areas. My findings highlight the importance of the spillover effect from regional total emission control programs.The second chapter studies a campaign-style innovative environmental enforcement strategy, the Central Environmental Protection Inspection (CEPI), which has assumed an important role in China's environmental enforcement since 2016. With the help of daily water pollution records from 2015 to 2018, this chapter documents the policy's short-term and long-term impacts. Utilizing a difference-in-differences style strategy and comparing water pollution readings from stations belonging to different batches of the policy, evidence is found indicating that local polluters tend to decrease emissions as a precaution prior to inspection periods. Meanwhile, the campaign achieves consistent pollution progress in terms of increasing dissolved oxygen and reducing ammonia nitrogen and total organic carbon emissions. The rebound effects are not strong enough to override water quality improvements. The results indicate that campaign-style enforcement, though possible to be manipulated by local polluters and governments in the short-run, remains a potentially efficient tool for policymakers to pursue long-term environmental enforcement goals.In the third chapter, I examines the existence and scale of interjurisdictional spillovers in China. I apply the difference-in-differences strategy to a unique dataset of more than 100 thousand firms' SO2 and COD emission records from 1998 through 2005. With the help of historical weather information, I identify the windward and leeward status for counties near provincial borders and find that firms located in windward counties relatively increase their SO2 emissions when local windspeed is higher. Heterogeneous analysis further finds that transboundary pollution is especially pronounced for private firms and across borders with yearly average wind speed around median level. The results suggest that a certain level of recentralization in environmental governance can be efficient for reducing transboundary pollution from windward counties in China.
| Author | : Kenneth Ewart Boulding |
| Publisher | : Johns Hopkins University Press |
| Total Pages | : 200 |
| Release | : 1971 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : |
| Author | : Hanxiao Li |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 147 |
| Release | : 2015 |
| Genre | : Automobiles |
| ISBN | : |
Motor vehicle emissions constitute a major source of local air pollution in the United States. The U.S. government stipulated motor fuel content regulations and required that cleaner fuels be adopted, instead of conventional gasoline, in certain pollution non-attainment areas. To determine the environmental effects of these regulations, the emissions levels that would have been reduced in the regulated areas in the absence of the regulations need to be known. However, this counter-factual does not exist. The difference-in-difference strategy employed in the current study takes the reductions in the emissions of control counties as a surrogate for the counter-factual of the regulated areas. I find that the introduction of gasoline content regulations results in a dramatic reduction in the pollution from on-road vehicles but not from off-road engines and vehicles, during the period 1990 to 2002. Therefore, the less affected pollution from the off-road sources could nullify the environmental benefits by adopting clean fuels. This may be an additional explanation for why local air quality did not improve though cleaner fuels were prescribed to certain polluted areas. An accelerated vehicle retirement program was also adopted by the U.S. government to address vehicle air pollution. The U.S. "Cash for Clunkers" (CARS) program offered incentive to participants who retired their current vehicles and purchased a new vehicle, provided that certain requirements on fuel economy improvements and vehicle categories were satisfied. I evaluate the pollution-reduction effects of this program. Based on the rich set of household and vehicle characteristics contained in the 2009 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data, an instrumental variable regression is used to predict the travel demand for the CARS retried and replacement vehicles and then their associated pollution. This study finds that the CARS program potentially does not result in a reduction of CO2 emissions and an environmental gain, even with taking into account its effects on the emissions of criteria pollutants. The U.S. Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards have imposed increasingly stringent requirements on vehicle fuel economy. The improvement of fuel efficiency is motivated by the desire to reduce fuel consumption and vehicle carbon emissions. However, the improved fuel efficiency leads to a reduced per-mile cost of driving and thus additional travel demand, which is a direct rebound or "take back" effect, because it may offset the potential fuel savings that otherwise would be obtained. This study empirically identifies the rebound effect by estimating a joint model, which determinines vehicle miles and fuel efficiency simultaneously. The current study finds no evidence of the rebound effect and concludes that the potential negative effect resulting from the fuel efficiency improvement should not be a concern.
| Author | : Elamin H. Elbasha |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 314 |
| Release | : 1996 |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : |
| Author | : Jiameng Zheng |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 468 |
| Release | : 2021 |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : |
Water pollution poses important challenges worldwide. In developed countries, most of the challenges from water pollution have to do with recreational and amenity use of water, as well as the negative impact on ecosystems. For instance, in the United States, dead zones caused by nutrient pollution occur annually in many major coastal waters, including Tampa Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay, and coastal North Carolina, causing large welfare effects in these regions. In developed countries like the United States, the aging drinking water infrastructure, such as the presence of lead pipes, is also a threat to human health. In developing countries, water pollution has a pronounced impact on human health given that safe drinking water is limited in many areas. Economic analysis plays a critical role in the making of environmental policy. In designing and assessing a water pollution control policy, it is important to understand the costs and benefits of such policies and be able to empirically evaluate their effectiveness. However, there are still important challenges in understanding the costs and benefits of water pollution control policies. Water quality improvement is a non-market good, so no direct price signal is available for valuing it. To overcome this problem, economists have developed several non-market valuation techniques, such as hedonic property models and recreation demand models. Each valuation method only captures a piece of the price consumers are willing to pay to improve water quality. This dissertation comprises three papers that answer some critical questions on the economic analysis of water pollution policies. In the first paper, I estimate the marginal willingness-to-pay of homeowners for water quality improvement in Florida,using a two-stage model that combines the recreational value and amenity value of both local and regional water quality improvement. This paper, which focuses on nutrient pollution problems related to the dead zones discussed earlier, generates a more comprehensive estimate of the benefits of water pollution reduction than that used in prior work. In the second paper, I estimate an important cost of water pollution by investigating the short-run and long-run educational impacts of lead pollution in drinking water. Using data from Texas, I find that drinking water lead exposure at birth has a significant negative impact on both 3rd-grade standardized test scores and the high school graduation rate. While many prior papers in environmental economics quantify short-run and long-run human capital costs of air pollution, this paper is one of only a few to do so for an important water pollution problem. Switching to the third paper, I examine the existing literature on the policy instruments that can be used to reduce water pollution. With a focus on developing countries, I describe the empirical evidence on the effectiveness of various water pollution control policies, identify the challenges for implementing and assessing such policies, and provide recommendations for future research
| Author | : Yu Fu |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 240 |
| Release | : 2012 |
| Genre | : Development economics |
| ISBN | : |
This thesis consists of three independent essays on the fields of development economics and environmental economics. The first two papers use the same theoretical model to explain different issues in developing countries. The third paper studies the effects of population growth on the Environmental Kuznets Curve provided it exists. China's internal migration plays an important role in explaining its recent economic success. The first paper constructs a model of labor migration, focusing on the role of selection effects in determining labor market outcomes, and then calibrates it to quantify the effects of China's labor market reforms on its outputs and inequality. I show that the removal of internal migration restrictions benefits the economy as a whole, while exacerbating inequality within both rural and urban areas. The second paper suggests that minimum wage policy may be beneficial for a transitional economy in which labor is migrating from rural areas to urban areas when positive moving costs occur. With a moving cost wedge a modestly binding minimum wage can cause relatively low productivity urban workers to be replaced by higher productivity rural migrants, and therefore increase aggregate output. To achieve the second best outcome, government shall fully compensate the moving costs for the marginal migrant workers who move from the rural industrial sector to the urban subsistence sector and a binding minimum wage shall be imposed on the urban workers but not the migrant workers in the urban industrial sector. The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis postulates an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and many local environmental health indicators. By using an overlapping generations (OLG) model, I focus on technological effects, where the properties of the existing pollution abatement technologies could generate the inverted U-shaped EKC and other forms of growth-pollution paths for the less advanced economies. Moreover, I examine the effects of population growth on the shape of the EKC, provided that it exists. Simulations indicate positive population growth raises the height of the EKC at every level of output per worker; thus, putting an extra burden on environment quality. Empirical evidence from China partially supports the results.
| Author | : Gina Moon Waterfield |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 105 |
| Release | : 2015 |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : |
Public initiative and referendum voting outcomes provide an opportune setting in which to study the demand for publicly provided goods and services, such as environmental quality and public education. In the first essay, I use census block group level voting outcomes on California statewide ballot propositions from 2006 to 2012 to test whether the relationship between voter support and income depends on a proposition's fiscal implications or the local availability of private substitutes. Support is modestly increasing in income when the proposition is associated with a regulatory change in the context of environmental protection. When propositions are tax or bond-funded, however, I find evidence of a convex or U-shaped relationship between median income and the share of votes in favor, consistent with the combined effects of a low tax burden on poor households and a low marginal utility of wealth among rich households. In the context of public education funding, I further find that the positive marginal effect of income at high income levels is moderated in block groups with greater availability of private substitutes, namely a greater density of nearby private schools. Individuals can express their preferences for public goods, and environmental protection in particular, both as voters by supporting regulation or as consumers by choosing favorable alternatives, thus providing a unique opportunity to compare consumer and voter behavior within the same individual and regarding the same issue. In the second essay, I examine the relationship between willingness to pay a premium for products that avoid a controversial technology associated with environmental risks or externalities, with willingness to vote in favor of a ban or mandatory labeling of the technology. Based on a survey on genetically modified food, I find that the majority of respondents make consumer and voter choices that can be explained by a standard utility maximization framework. However, certain respondent characteristics are correlated with inconsistent choice patterns. In particular, low-income voters appear to be overly supportive of regulation relative to their private willingness to pay. Voters who are uncertain about the safety of genetically modified food also tend to be more in favor of mandatory labeling than their consumer choices would imply. While the first two essays consider the relationship between income and demand for environmental protection at a micro level, there are also much broader implications of this relationship. At the country level, higher GDP is often associated with stricter pollution regulation, which may imply a disproportionate amount of production of pollution-intensive goods in less wealthy countries. The hypothesis that countries with relatively strict pollution regulation will be more likely to import pollution intensive goods from countries with weaker or absent regulation is intuitively appealing and has found moderate support in a number of empirical studies. While these studies focus on the regulation of manufacturing industries, the underlying theoretical argument applies equally to the agricultural sector. The third essay assesses whether cross-country differences in pesticide regulation can induce such "pollution haven'' effects. In particular, I estimate the impact of the international phaseout of methyl bromide on trade flows in agricultural products. I find robust evidence that cross-country differences in allowed methyl bromide usage affect trade flows, and show that the effect varies in magnitude and significance across commodities, largely in line with their baseline reliance on MeBr. The results do not suggest that countries granted exemptions from the phaseout for particular commodities, on the basis of such reliance, gained an unfair competitive advantage.
| Author | : Haowei Yu |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 119 |
| Release | : 2017 |
| Genre | : Bureaucracy |
| ISBN | : |
This dissertation applies theoretical and empirical methods to investigate policies and political issues that are related to environmental degradation and regulation. Chapter one analyzes effects of the nominal exchange rate on pollution emissions. The overall effect is decomposed into scale, composition and technique effects, which reflects the size, structure and abatement technology of the economy, respectively. The overall and composition effects are found to be positive and significant for countries with fixed exchange rate regimes, while countries with floating regimes experience a positive but less significant scale effect and an insignificant overall effect. Chapter two examines welfare implications of two environmental taxes that result in a fixed aggregate tax revenue: the double-dividend and the integrated tax-subsidy. The former alters existing distortionary taxes (e.g., labor tax), while the latter changes the pollution tax of relatively clean goods based on an adjustment of the pollution tax on more pollution intensive goods. Results show that the double-dividend policy dominates in revenue-recycling effect and tax-interaction effect and results in higher social welfare. Chapter three explores effects of bureaucratic quality on firm productivity and social welfare, given the existence of with-sector product substitutability. Bureaucratic quality is defined as how the government cares about social welfare relative to other incomes; within-sector product substitutability is denoted by the perceived differentiation of firms' products in a sector. A lower bureaucratic quality is found to lead to higher average and cutoff firm productivity within a sector. However, the social welfare is negatively affected when the bureaucratic quality decreases. Product substitutability has a positive effect on firm productivity, but it does not affect firm's lobbying behavior.
