Do EPA Regulations Affect Labor Demand? Evidence from the Pulp and Paper Industry

Wayne B. Gray, Ronald J. Shabegian, Chumbei Wang and Merve Cebi

No 280913, National Center for Environmental Economics-NCEE Working Papers from United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Abstract: Many believe that environmental regulation must reduce employment, since regulations are expected to increase production costs, raising prices and reducing demand for output. A careful microeconomic analysis shows that this not guaranteed. Even if environmental regulation reduces output in the regulated industry, abating pollution could require additional labor (e.g. to monitor the abatement capital and meet EPA reporting requirements). Pollution abatement technologies could also be labor enhancing. In this paper we analyze how a particular EPA regulation, the “Cluster Rule” (CR) imposed on the pulp and paper industry in 2001, affected employment in that sector. Using establishment level data from the Census of Manufacturers and Annual Survey of Manufacturers at the U.S. Census Bureau from 1992-2007 we find evidence of small employment declines (on the order of 3%-7%), sometimes statistically significant, at a subset of the plants covered by the CR.

Keywords: Demand and Price Analysis; Environmental Economics and Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42
Date: 2013-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/280913/files/NCEE2013-03.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:nceewp:280913

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.280913

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in National Center for Environmental Economics-NCEE Working Papers from United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().