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....

This paper describes a novel approach to estimating the marginal cost of air pollution regulation, then applies it to assess whether a large set of existing U.S. air pollution regulations have marginal costs exceeding their marginal benefits. The approach utilizes an important yet underexplored...

Do US air pollution offset markets disproportionately relocate pollution to or from low-income or minority communities? Concerns about an equal distribution of environmental quality across communities--environmental justice--have growing policy influence. We relate prices and quantities of...

Willingness to pay for air quality is a function of health and the costly defensive investments that contribute to health, but there is little research assessing the empirical importance of defensive investments. The setting for this paper is a large US emissions cap and trade market - the NOx...

What is a feasible and efficient policy to regulate air pollution from vehicles? A Pigouvian tax is technologically infeasible. Most countries instead rely on exhaust standards that limit air pollution emissions per mile for new vehicles. We assess the effectiveness and efficiency of these...