This article proposes and evaluates four hypotheses about US pollution and environmental policy over the last half century. First, air and water pollution have declined substantially, although greenhouse gas emissions have not. Second, environmental policy explains a large share of these trends....

Seminal work by Weitzman (1974) revealed prices are preferred to quantities when marginal benefits are relatively flat compared to marginal costs. We extend this comparison to indexed policies, where quantities are proportional to an index, such as output. We find that policy preferences hinge...

This chapter for the Handbook of Law and Economics provides an economic perspective of environmental law and policy. We examine the ends of environmental policy, that is, the setting of goals and targets, beginning with normative issues, notably the Kaldor-Hicks criterion and the related method...

Under most federal environmental laws and some health and safety laws, states may apply for quot;primacy,quot; that is, authority to implement and enforce federal law, through a process known as quot;authorization.quot; Some observers fear that states use authorization to adopt more lax policies...

The MIT Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis model is applied to synthetic policies that match key attributes of a set of cap-and-trade proposals being considered by the U.S. Congress in spring 2007. The bills fall into two groups: one specifies emissions reductions of 50% to 80% below 1990...

This paper presents both analytics and numerical simulation results relevant to proposals for carbon motivated regional trade agreements summarized in Dong amp; Whalley(2008). Unlike traditional regional trade agreements, by lowing tariffs on participant's low carbon emission goods and setting...

This chapter provides an overview of key economic issues in the use of taxation as an instrument of environmental policy in the UK. It first reviews economic arguments for using taxes and other market mechanisms in environmental policy, discusses the choice of tax base, and considers the value...

This paper examines the effect of stringent environmental regulations on firms' environmental practices, economic performance, and environmental innovation. Reducing COD levels by 10% relative to 2005 levels is an aim of the Chinese 11th Five-Year Plan. Using a difference-in-differences...

This paper assesses the use of full-employment computable-general equilibrium (CGE) models to predict the labor-market effects of environmental policy. Specifically, it compares the predictions of a standard full-employment CGE model with those of a new search-CGE model with labor-search...

This paper provides the first estimates of within-industry heterogeneity in energy and CO2 productivity for the entire U.S. manufacturing sector. We measure energy and CO2 productivity as output per dollar energy input or per ton CO2 emitted. Three findings emerge. First, within narrowly defined...