Do production subsidies have a wage incidence in wind power?

Dakshina De Silva, Robert P. McComb and Anita R. Schiller

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Employment in electricity generation from renewable resources has expanded rapidly in the US and in Texas during the last decade. Availability of the Production Tax Credit has been an important driver of this growth. Using a fully-disclosed establishment-level employment and payroll data set for Texas at the NAICS-6 level, we analyze the differences in average wages between firms generating electricity from fossil fuels and those generating electricity from wind power. We compare relative average wages before and after the rapid expansion of wind power development that followed the ex ante renewal of the Production Tax Credit (PTC) in 2006. Using QCEW data, our main finding using both least squares and the nonparametric estimation technique proposed by Racine and Li (2004), is that average payrolls for wind power generators increased relative to fossil fuel-based electricity generators after 2006. As far as we know, this is the first paper that attempts to estimate the indirect impact of the PTC on wind energy industry wages.

Keywords: Wages; Production Tax Credits; Wind energy; Clean Energy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 Q20 Q28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-10-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/33861/1/MPRA_paper_33861.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/41907/1/MPRA_paper_41907.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do production subsidies have a wage incidence in wind power? (2013)
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:pra:mprapa:33861

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().