The Transitional Costs of Sectoral Reallocation: Evidence From the Clean Air Act and the Workforce

Reed Walker

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2013, vol. 128, issue 4, 1787-1835

Abstract: This article uses linked worker-firm data in the United States to estimate the transitional costs associated with reallocating workers from newly regulated industries to other sectors of the economy in the context of new environmental regulations. The focus on workers rather than industries as the unit of analysis allows me to examine previously unobserved economic outcomes such as nonemployment and long-run earnings losses from job transitions, both of which are critical to understanding the reallocative costs associated with these policies. Using plant-level panel variation induced by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA), I find that the reallocative costs of environmental policy are significant. Workers in newly regulated plants experienced, in aggregate, more than $5.4 billion in forgone earnings for the years after the change in policy. Most of these costs are driven by nonemployment and lower earnings in future employment, highlighting the importance of longitudinal data for characterizing the costs and consequences of labor market adjustment. Relative to the estimated benefits of the 1990 CAAA, these one-time transitional costs are small. JEL Codes: Q50, H41, R11. Copyright 2013, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (233)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjt022 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Transitional Costs of Sectoral Reallocation: Evidence from the Clean Air Act and the Workforce (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:128:y:2013:i:4:p:1787-1835

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().