This paper describes a new, industry-adjusted index of state environmental compliance costs from 1977 to 1994. The index has two principal advantages: It controls for states' industrial compositions, and it can be calculated for 17 years, thus facilitating comparisons both among states and...

Starting in the 1970s California's residential electricity consumption per capita stopped increasing, while other states' electricity use continued to grow steadily. Similar patterns can be seen in non-electric energy, industry, and transportation. Had other states' energy use followed...

Chapter in Research Handbook on Behavioral Law and Economics, Joshua Teitelbaum and Kathryn Zeiler (editors)

Researchers have long been interested in whether environmental regulations discourage investment, reduce labour demand, or alter patterns of international trade. But estimating those consequences of regulations requires devising a means of measuring their stringency empirically. While creating...

This paper describes and implements a method for estimating the average marginal value of a time-varying local public good: air quality. It uses the General Social Survey (GSS), which asks thousands of people in various U.S. locations how happy they are, along with other demographic and attitude...

Two central topics in recent rounds of international trade negotiations have been environmental concerns, and services trade. While each is undoubtedly important, they are unrelated. In this paper I show that the services-environment link is small, for two reasons. First, services account for...

This paper uses both theory and empirical work to examine the effect of environmental regulations on trade flows. We develop a simple economic model to demonstrate how unobserved heterogeneity, endogeneity and aggregation issues bias measurements of the relationship between regulatory costs and...

U.S. Presidential Executive Order 13141 commits the United States to a "careful assessment and consideration of the environmental impacts of trade agreements." The most direct mechanism through which trade liberalization would affect environmental quality in the U.S. is through changes in the...

This paper uses the National Survey of America's Families (NSAF) to examine whether the low take-up rate for publicly provided health insurance is caused by welfare stigma that people associate with those programs. The NSAF asks several questions related to welfare stigma, including whether...

This paper estimates the extent to which stringent environmental standards in some U.S. states have deterred foreign direct investment (FDI). It addresses three shortcomings in the existing literature on the economic effects of environmental regulations. First, it avoids comparing regulations in...