Targeting Distributional Impacts in the Presence of Behavioral Responses: Lessons from Maritime Emissions Regulation

Jamie Hansen-Lewis and Michelle M. Marcus

No 34055, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Targeting distributional impacts is gaining importance in the design of environmental policy. To achieve this, policy makers are adopting advances in air transport models to predict the benefits of air emissions regulation. These models offer policy makers accuracy in the spatial distribution of ambient air quality improvements for a given emissions reduction, but do not take into account behavioral responses to environmental policies. We consider how the failure to account for behavioral responses when making policy predictions may have important implications for the ultimate distributional impact of such policies. We compare the distributional impacts of maritime emission regulation predicted from the policy maker's air transport model to the realized distributional impacts. We then decompose the prediction error from two components: model error, whereby the predictions of air transport models fail to account for behavioral responses of polluting firms, and sorting error, whereby the targeted population migrates.

JEL-codes: Q5 Q51 Q52 Q53 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-07
Note: CH EEE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34055.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:34055

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34055
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().