How Did Air Quality Standards Affect Employment at U.S. Power Plants? The Importance of Stringency, Geography, and Timing

Glenn Sheriff, Ann Ferris and Ron Shadbegian ()

No 201501, NCEE Working Paper Series from National Center for Environmental Economics, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Abstract: Geographical differences in U.S. Clean Air Act requirements are often used to identify environmental regulatory impacts. The standard approach abstracts from aspects of the law affecting which areas are regulated, how strictly they are regulated, and when regulatory changes occur. We find that omitting these factors can bias results by contaminating the control group, leading to under-estimation of historical employment impacts and overestimation of projected impacts from tightening regulations. Results indicate that 1990 changes to ozone nonattainment provisions reduced power plant employment without significantly affecting generation, suggesting that installation of pollution controls contributed to labor-saving technical change at affected sources.

Keywords: air pollution; electricity; employment; regulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q52 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2015-05, Revised 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/workin ... -employment-us-power First version, 2015 (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:nev:wpaper:wp201501

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NCEE Working Paper Series from National Center for Environmental Economics, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cynthia Morgan ().