Who Benefits from Environmental Regulation? Evidence from the Clean Air Act Amendments

Antonio Bento (), Matthew Freedman and Corey Lang
Additional contact information
Corey Lang: University of Rhode Island

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2015, vol. 97, issue 3, 610-622

Abstract: Using geographically disaggregated data and exploiting an instrumental variable strategy, we show that contrary to conventional wisdom, the benefits of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA) were progressive. The CAAA created incentives for local regulators to target the initially dirtiest areas for cleanup, creating heterogeneity in the incidence of air quality improvements that favored lower-income households. Based on house price appreciation, households in the lowest quintile of the income distribution received annual benefits from the program equal to 0.3 percent of their income on average during the 1990s, over twice as much as those in the highest quintile.

Keywords: environmental regulation; clean air act; clean air act amendments; CAAA; low income households; cleanup (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 I32 Q43 Q48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (52)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00493 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:tpr:restat:v:97:y:2015:i:2:p:610-622

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().