Efficient electricity pricing involves two-part tariffs: a volumetric price equal to the marginal cost of producing an additional kilowatt hour (kWh) and a fixed fee to cover any remaining fixed costs. In this paper we explore how US electricity regulators depart from this simple two-part tariff...

This paper considers the treatment of co-benefits in benefit-cost analysis of federal air quality regulations. Using a comprehensive data set on all major Clean Air Act rules issued by the Environmental Protection Agency over the period 1997-2019, we show that (1) co-benefits make up a...

Regulators attest that tightened energy efficiency standards save consumers money. Efficient light bulbs, appliances, and vehicles cost more upfront but reduce energy expenses by more than enough to compensate. We use survey data on American cars and their drivers to examine whether individual...

The US has been a global leader in regulating local air pollution and a global laggard in regulating greenhouse gases (GHGs). For decades, critics of US policy have expressed fears that stringent US regulations on local air pollution would lead to pollution havens overseas. Prior research,...

We examine the labor market consequences of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), comparing labor market behavior of eligible parents in Wisconsin, which supplements the federal EITC for families with three children, to that of similar parents in states that do not supplement the federal EITC....

Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) subsidize out-of-pocket health expenses not covered by employer-provided health insurance, making health care cheaper ex post, but also reducing the incentive to insure. We use a cross section of .rm-level data to show that FSAs are indeed associated with...

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...

In numerous studies, economists have found little empirical evidence that environmental regulations affect trade flows. In this paper, we propose and test several common explanations for why the effect of environmental regulations on trade may be difficult to detect. We demonstrate that while...

Evidence suggests that some pollutants follow an inverse-U-shaped pattern relative to countries' incomes. This relationship has been called the out a simple and straight-forward static model of the microfoundations of the pollution-income relationship. We show that the environmental Kuznets...