Intertemporal tradability allows an emissions market to reduce abatement costs. We study intertemporal trading of nitrogen oxides permits in the RECLAIM program in Southern California. A theoretical model captures the program's key intertemporal features: two overlapping permit cycles, two...

We conduct the first study on the impacts of prenatal exposure to a uniquely identified large polluter, a coal-fired power plant located near the border of two states, on the birth outcomes of the downwind state. For mothers who live as far as 20 to 40 miles away but downwind of the power plant,...

Title IV of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 created a market for electric utility emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2). Recent papers have argued that flaws in the design of the auctions that are part of this market have adversely affected its performance. These papers incorrectly assume that...

Electric utilities can reduce sulfur dioxide emissions through a variety of strategies such as adding scrubbers, switching to low- sulfur coal, or shifting output between generating plants with different emissions. The cost of achieving a given emission target can be minimized using a market for...

This paper uses an updated and revised panel data set on ambient air pollution in cities world-wide to examine the robustness of the evidence for the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between national income and pollution. We test the sensitivity of the pollution-income relationship...

This study uses sharp, differential air quality changes across sites attributable to geographic variation in the effects of the 1981-82 recession to estimate the relationship between infant mortality and particulates air pollution. It is shown that in the narrow period of 1980-82, there was...

Many human activities can be strategically timed around forecastable natural hazards to mute their impacts. We study air pollution shock mitigation in a high-stakes healthcare setting: hospital surgery scheduling. Using newly available inpatient surgery records from a major city in China, we...

Regulators often rely on self-reported data to determine compliance. Tolerance for missingness in self-monitoring data may create incentives for local agents to strategically decide when (not) to monitor regulated activities. This paper builds a framework to detect whether local governments skip...

In this paper, we study the role of information in non-market valuation. We develop a variant of the Rosen-Roback model of inter-urban sorting that incorporates public access to information about air quality, and demonstrate that information constraints create a wedge between the revealed and...

We examine the real effects of the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) on electric power plants in the United States. Starting in 2010, the GHGRP requires both the reporting of greenhouse gas emissions by facilities emitting more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year to the...