Between 1995 and 2008, the European Union and the United States raised environmental standards and concurrently experienced important reductions in emissions from manufacturing despite a rise in output. Levinson (2009) finds that the offshoring of polluting industries to countries with lower...

Under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was required to establish standards limiting air toxics emissions from industrial plants. This paper examines the effect of five of the largest cost rules issued by EPA in the initial round of air toxics...

The development of climate policy in the United States mirrors international developments, with efforts to initiate a coordinated approach giving way to jurisdictions separately taking actions. The centerpiece of US policy is regulation in the electricity sector that identifies a carbon...

Given the increased national attention to the use of the Clean Air Act to address climate change, an analysis of the origins of the Clean Air Act is instructive for understanding the law in its current form. Contrary to the traditional view, the formation of the Clean Air Act was not the result...

This paper develops a micro-founded city systems model with an endogenous number of cities to explore whether local governments establish the optimal city size when production processes involve environmental pollution. Our analysis delivers two key insights. First, if an optimal scheme to...

Who benefits from market-based environmental policies? To shed light on this question, we investigate the environmental and distributional consequences of regional cap-and-trade programs to mitigate sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from U.S. power plants. Using double and triple differences,...

Although economists cite potential gains from induced innovation as an advantage of using market-based mechanisms to protect the environment, counts of patents related to flue gas desulfurization units ('scrubbers') peaked before trading of sulfur dioxide (SO2) permits began. This paper uses...

In the US, much of the authority to administer the Clean Air Act (CAA) is delegated to indi-vidual states. States are responsible primarily for the administration of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), which impose technological and other requirements on stationary emission...

This report provides the first national-level approximation of priority sources and actions to address air pollution while maximizing synergies with climate mitigation and managing trade-off challenges. The study uses mean population exposure as the best approximation of air quality impact...