NBER-Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy – serie

This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and related policy issues. Robert Pindyck provides a systematic overview of what is known, and remains unknown, about climate change, along with the implications of uncertainty for climate policy. Shaikh Eskander, Sam Fankhauser, and Joana Setzer offer insights from a comprehensive data set on climate change legislation and litigation across all countries of the world over the past thirty years. Adele Morris, Noah Kaufman, and Siddhi Doshi shine a light on how expected trends in the coal industry will create significant challenges for the local public finance of coal-reliant communities. Joseph Aldy and his collaborators analyze the treatment of co-benefits in benefit-cost analyses of federal clean air regulations. Tatyana Deryugina and her co-authors report on the geographic and socioeconomic heterogeneity in the benefits of reducing particulate matter air pollution. Finally, Oliver Browne, Ludovica Gazze, and Michael Greenstone use detailed data on residential water consumption to evaluate the relative impacts of conservation policies based on prices, restrictions, and public persuasion.

Rigorous, careful, and nonpartisan research with a high policy impact on environmental and energy economics.Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy focuses on the effective and efficient management of environmental and energy challenges. Research papers offer new evidence on the intended and unintended consequences, the market and nonmarket effects, and the incentive and distributional impacts of policy initiatives and market developments.This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and policy. Gilbert Metcalf examines the distributional impacts of substituting a vehicle miles-traveled tax for the existing federal excise tax in the United States. David Weisbach, Samuel Kortum, Michael Wang, and Yujia Yao consider solutions to the leakage problem of climate policy with differential tax policies on the supply and demand for fossil fuels and on domestic production and consumption. Danae Hernandez-Cortes, Kyle Meng, and Paige Weber quantify and decompose recent trends in air pollution disparities in the US electricity sector. Severin Borenstein and Ryan Kellogg provide a comparative analysis of different incentive-based mechanisms to reduce emissions in the electricity sector on a path to zero emissions. Sarah Anderson, Andrew Plantinga, and Matthew Wibbenmeyer document distributional differences in the allocation of  US wildfire prevention projects. Finally, Mark Curtis and Ioana Marinescu provide new evidence on the quality and quantity of emerging “green” jobs in the United States.

Rigorous, careful, and nonpartisan research with a high policy impact on environmental and energy economics.Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy focuses on the effective and efficient management of environmental and energy challenges. Research papers offer new evidence on the intended and unintended consequences, the market and nonmarket effects, and the incentive and distributional impacts of policy initiatives and market developments.This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and policy. James Bushnell and Aaron Smith illustrate a new way of modeling uncertainty for the purpose of understanding climate policy effects in the US electricity sector. Xinming Du, Muye Ru, and Douglas Almond estimate the effect of a federal requirement for oil and gas firms to detect and repair methane leaks, showing that the removal of the regulation in 2020 prompted an increase in emissions. Ivan Rudik, Derek Lemoine, and Antonia Marcheva explore equity and efficiency tradeoffs in climate adaptation funding as part of the 2021 US Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. John Bistline, Kimberly A. Clausing, Neil R. Mehrotra, James H. Stock, and Catherine Wolfram outline a range of different US climate policy options for near-term implementation. Frances C. Moore considers the potential economic consequences of accounting for non-stationarity in the distribution of weather because of climate change. Finally, Ben Groom and Frank Venmans discuss different ways of quantifying the social value of temporary reductions in atmospheric carbon, with implications for carbon offset markets.