Air Pollution and Criminal Activity: Evidence from Chicago Microdata
Published December 8, 2015 by Evan Hernstadt and Erich Muehlegger. View the abstract.Return to the Papers listing. | Download the paper. A large and growing literature documents the adverse impacts of pollution on health, productivity, educational attainment and socioeconomic outcomes. This paper provides the first quasi-experimental evidence that air pollution casually affects criminal activity. We exploit […]
From Cradle to Junkyard: Assessing the life cycle Greenhouse Gas Benefits of Electric Vehicles
Published August 25, 2015 by David Rapson. View the abstract.Return to the Papers listing | Download the paper. U.S. programs subsidize electric vehicles (EVs) in part to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We model a suite of life cycle GHG emissions considerations to estimate the GHG abatement potential from switching from an internal combustion engine […]
Commodity Storage and the Market Effects of Biofuel Policies
Published July 1, 2015 by Aaron Smith. View the abstract.Return to the Papers listing | Download the paper. US legislation passed in 2007 (RFS2) increased by about 1.3 billion bushels the net amount of corn required to be processed annually into ethanol for motor-fuel use. Using modern time-series methods, we estimate that corn prices were […]
Rethinking Trade-Exposure: The Incidence of Environmental Charges in the Nitrogenous Fertilizer Industry
Published June 1, 2015 by Jacob Humer and James Bushnell. View the abstract.Return to the Papers listing. | Download the paper. The imposition of environmental regulations, such as greenhouse gas charges, to domestic manufacturing traditionally creates concerns over the impacts of those regulations on international competition and downstream product prices. The US Nitrogen fertilizer industry, […]
Utilization and Customer Behavior: Smart Choices for the Smart Grid
Published May 3, 2015 by Jeremy B. Smith. View the abstract.Return to the Papers listing. | Download the paper. The smart grid offers a wide array of opportunities to improve efficiency of the electricity grid via load management policies. This chapter reviews the current state of knowledge in the economics literature as it relates to time-varying […]
Overlapping Environmental Policies and the Impact on Pollution
Published April 29, 2015 by Kevin Novan. View the abstract.Return to the Papers listing. | Download the paper. In an effort to reduce pollution from the electricity sector, governments are heavily subsidizing renewables. The subsidies, however, are not being used in isolation. Instead, they are often provided in regions where certain pollutants are regulated by […]
Commercial and Industrial Demand Response Under Mandatory Time-of-Use Electricity Pricing
Published March 17, 2015 by David Rapson. View the abstract.Return to the Papers listing. | Download the paper. This paper is the first to evaluate the impact of a large-scale field deployment of mandatory time-of-use (TOU) pricing on the energy use of commercial and industrial firms. The regulation imposes higher user prices during hours when […]
Policy Shocks and Market-Based Regulations: Evidence from the Renewable Fuel Standard
Published May 7, 2015 by Aaron Smith. View the abstract.Return to the Papers listing. | Download the paper. The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2) is a US federal policy that mandates large increases in biofuel consumption and is implemented using a market for tradeable compliance credits. We develop a dynamic model of compliance with the RFS2 […]
Strategic Policy Choice in State-Level Regulation: The EPA’s Clean Power Plan
Published December 2, 2014 by James B. Bushnell. View the abstract.Return to the Papers listing. | Download the paper. Flexibility in environmental regulations can lead to reduced costs if it allows additional abatement from lower cost sources or if policy tailoring and experimentation across states increases regulatory efficiency. The EPA’s 2014 Clean Power Plan, which […]
The U.S. Electricity Industry after 20 Years of Restructuring
Published September 1, 2014 by James Bushnell. View the abstract.Return to the Papers listing. | Download the paper. Prior to the 1990s, most electricity customers in the U.S. were served by regulated, vertically-integrated, monopoly utilities that handled electricity generation, transmission, local distribution and billing/collections. Regulators set retail electricity prices to allow the utility to recover […]
