Drinking Water Contaminant Concentrations and Birth Outcomes.

Previous research in the US has found negative health effects of contamination when it triggers regulatory violations. An important question is whether levels of contamination that do not trigger a health-based violation impact health. We study the impact of drinking water contamination in community water systems on birth outcomes using drinking water sampling results data in Pennsylvania. We focus on the effects of water contamination for births not exposed to regulatory violations. Our most rigorous specification employs mother fixed effects and finds changing from the 10th to the 90th percentile of water contamination (among births not exposed to regulatory violations) increases low birth weight by 12% and preterm birth by 17%.

Electric vehicle usage, pollution damages, and the electricity price elasticity of driving.

I study battery electric vehicle (BEV) usage and ownership characteristics with fundamental implications for the electrification of passenger transportation. Using data covering the entire BEV population in New York, I quantify BEV mileage and electricity consumption and highlight the important role of vehicle utilization in contributing to real-world pollution damages and their spatial variation. I then study the factors influencing how much BEVs are driven with a focus on estimating the electricity price elasticity of BEV mileage. Understanding how drivers respond to these changes in operating costs may help align the social and private costs of BEV driving and illustrates how electric utilities may affect transportation outcomes in the future. I find a 10% increase in residential electricity prices reduces mileage by 1%, but responsiveness falls as public charging stations-where prices are often decoupled from electricity costs-become available.

Exploring the General Equilibrium Costs of Sector-Specific Environmental Regulations.

The requisite scope of analysis to adequately estimate the social cost of environmental regulations has been subject to much discussion. The literature has demonstrated that engineering or partial equilibrium cost estimates likely underestimate the social cost of large-scale environmental regulations and environmental taxes. However, the conditions under which general equilibrium (GE) analysis adds value to welfare analysis for single-sector technology or performance standards, the predominant policy intervention in practice, remains an open question. Using a numerical computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, we investigate the GE effects of regulations across different sectors, abatement technologies, and regulatory designs. Our results show that even for small regulations GE effects are significant, and engineering estimates of compliance costs can substantially underestimate the social cost of single-sector environmental regulations. We find the downward bias from using engineering costs to approximate social costs depends on the input composition of abatement technologies and the regulated sector.

Pollution Abatement and Employment.

Morgenstern et al. (2002) is well-known for its investigation of the employment effects of environmental regulations. However, the cost function specified in that paper is handicapped by its reliance on survey data of the costs of inputs assigned to pollution abatement. In this paper, we specify an input distance function that models the joint production of good and bad outputs. This allows us to measure the relative importance of factors associated with changes in employment without pollution abatement cost data. We operationalize our model using a sample of 80 coal-fired electric power plants from 1995-2005.

Retrospective Evaluation of the Costs of Complying with Light-Duty Vehicle Surface Coating Requirements.

This paper compares the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) ex-ante compliance cost estimates for the 2004 Automobile and Light-Duty Truck Surface Coating National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants to ex-post evidence on the actual costs of compliance based on ex-post cost data gathered from a subset of the industry via pilot survey and follow-up interviews. Unlike many prior retrospective studies on the cost of regulatory compliance, we use this newly-gathered information to identify the key drivers of any differences between the ex-ante and ex-post estimates. We find that the U.S. EPA overestimated the cost of compliance for the plants in our sample and that overestimation was driven primarily by differences in the method of compliance rather than differences in the perunit cost associated with a given compliance approach. In particular, the U.S. EPA expected facilities to install pollution abatement control technologies in their paint shops to reduce emissions of hazardous air pollutants, but instead these plants complied by reformulating coatings.

INTRODUCTION TO THE EMF 32 STUDY ON U.S. CARBON TAX SCENARIOS.

This paper is an introduction to, "The EMF 32 Study on U.S. Carbon Tax Scenarios," part of the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) Model Inter-comparison Project (MIP) number 32. Eleven modeling teams participated in this study examining the economic and environmental impacts of various carbon tax trajectories and differing uses of carbon tax revenues. This special issue of Climate Change Economics documents the results of this study with four crosscutting papers that summarize results across models, and ten papers from individual modeling teams.