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Jobs and Environmental Regulation

Marc Hafstead and Roberton Williams

No 19-19, RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future

Abstract: Political debates around environmental regulation often center on the effect of policy on jobs. Opponents decry the “job-killing” Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and proponents point to “green” jobs as a positive policy outcome. Beyond the political debates, Congress requires EPA to evaluate “potential losses or shifts of employment” that regulations under the Clean Air Act may cause. Yet there is a sharp disconnect between the political importance of the jobs question and the general skepticism in the academic literature about the importance of job effects for the costs and benefits of environmental regulation (and correspondingly limited research on those job effects).In this paper, we discuss how the existing research on jobs and environmental regulations often falls short in evaluating these questions and consider recent work that has attempted to address these problems. We provide an intuitive discussion of key questions for how job effects should enter into economic analysis of regulations. And, using an economic model from Hafstead, Williams, and Chen (2018), we evaluate a range of environmental regulations in both the short and long run to develop a set of key stylized facts related to jobs and environmental regulations as well as identify the key questions that current models can’t yet answer well.

Date: 2019-08-14
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https://www.rff.org/documents/2190/WP_19-19_Hafstead_Williams_6.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Jobs and Environmental Regulation (2020) Downloads
Chapter: Jobs and Environmental Regulation (2019) Downloads
Working Paper: Jobs and Environmental Regulation (2019) Downloads
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