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101 results
2024
Bistline, John, Kimberly A. Clausing, Neil Mehrotra, James H. Stock, and Catherine Wolfram. “Climate Policy Reform Options in 2025.”
Bistline, John, Kimberly A. Clausing, Neil Mehrotra, James H. Stock, and Catherine Wolfram. “Climate Policy Reform Options in 2025.”
With the expiration of many tax cuts and unmet climate targets, 2025 could be a crucial year for climate policy in the United States. Using an integrated model of energy supply and demand, this paper aims to assess climate policies that the U.S. federal...
Spillover effects can impede or advance climate action. They have enabled some of the greatest successes in climate change mitigation, yet also threaten to undermine accelerating decarbonization efforts. Because they are difficult to define and quantify...
2023
Bilal, Adrien, and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg. “Anticipating Climate Change Across the United States”. Harvard Environmental Economics Program, no. dp\_94 (2023): 23-94.
Bilal, Adrien, and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg. “Anticipating Climate Change Across the United States”. Harvard Environmental Economics Program, no. dp\_94 (2023): 23-94.
We evaluate how anticipation and adaptation shape the aggregate and local costs of climate change. We develop a dynamic spatial model of the U.S. economy and its 3,143 counties that features costly forward-looking migration and capital investment...
2022
Aldy, Joseph E., and Zachery Halem. “The Evolving Role of Greenhouse Gas Emission Offsets in Combating Climate Change.”
Aldy, Joseph E., and Zachery Halem. “The Evolving Role of Greenhouse Gas Emission Offsets in Combating Climate Change.”
As governments, firms, and universities advance ambitious greenhouse gas emission goals, the demand for emission offsets – projects that reduce or remove emissions relative to a counterfactual scenario – will increase. Reservations about an offset’s...
Aldy, Joseph E. “Learning How to Build Back Better through Clean Energy Policy Evaluation.”
Aldy, Joseph E. “Learning How to Build Back Better through Clean Energy Policy Evaluation.”
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act authorized and appropriated unprecedented spending and tax expenditures to decarbonize the American economy. In the spirit of “build back better,” this...
2021
Evans, Mary, Karen Palmer, Joseph Aldy, Meredith Fowlie, Matthew Kotchen, and Arik Levinson. “The Role of Retrospective Analysis in an Era of Deregulation: Lessons from the U.S. Mercury Air Toxic Standards”. Harvard Environmental Economics Program, 2021.
Evans, Mary, Karen Palmer, Joseph Aldy, Meredith Fowlie, Matthew Kotchen, and Arik Levinson. “The Role of Retrospective Analysis in an Era of Deregulation: Lessons from the U.S. Mercury Air Toxic Standards”. Harvard Environmental Economics Program, 2021.
As of late 2020, the Trump administration had initiated almost one hundred rollbacks of U.S. environmental regulations. A careful assessment of the benefits and costs of rolling back an existing regulation can and should inform such decisions. When...
Aldy, Joseph, Matthew Kotchen, Mary Evans, Meredith Fowlie, Arik Levinson, and Karen Palmer. “Co-Benefits and Regulatory Impact Analysis: Theory and Evidence from Federal Air Quality Regulations”. Discussion Paper, 2021, 45.
Aldy, Joseph, Matthew Kotchen, Mary Evans, Meredith Fowlie, Arik Levinson, and Karen Palmer. “Co-Benefits and Regulatory Impact Analysis: Theory and Evidence from Federal Air Quality Regulations”. Discussion Paper, 2021, 45.
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...
Aldy, Joseph E., Giles Atkinson, and Matthew Kotchen. “Environmental Benefit-Cost Analysis: A Comparative Analysis Between the United States and the United Kingdom”. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: Harvard Environmental Economics Program, 2021.
Aldy, Joseph E., Giles Atkinson, and Matthew Kotchen. “Environmental Benefit-Cost Analysis: A Comparative Analysis Between the United States and the United Kingdom”. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: Harvard Environmental Economics Program, 2021.
The United States and United Kingdom have longstanding traditions in use of environmental benefit-cost analysis (E-BCA). While there are similarities between how E-BCA is utilized, there are significant differences too, many of which mirror ongoing...
Ramelli, Stefano, Alexander Wagner, Alexandre Ziegler, and Richard Zeckhauser. “Investor Rewards to Climate Responsibility: Stock-Price Responses to the Opposite Shocks of the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Elections”. Harvard Environmental Economics Program, 2021.
Ramelli, Stefano, Alexander Wagner, Alexandre Ziegler, and Richard Zeckhauser. “Investor Rewards to Climate Responsibility: Stock-Price Responses to the Opposite Shocks of the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Elections”. Harvard Environmental Economics Program, 2021.
Donald Trump’s 2016 election and his nomination of climate skeptic Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency drastically downshifted expectations on U.S. policy toward climate change. Joseph Biden’s 2020 election shifted them dramatically...
2020
Stock, James H. “Data Gaps and the Policy Response to the Novel Coronavirus”. Harvard Environmental Economics Program Discussion Paper Series, 2020.
Stock, James H. “Data Gaps and the Policy Response to the Novel Coronavirus”. Harvard Environmental Economics Program Discussion Paper Series, 2020.
This note lays out the basic Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) epidemiological model of contagion, with a target audience of economists who want a framework for understanding the effects of social distancing and containment policies on the evolution of...
Aldy, Joseph E., Maximillian Auffhammer, Maureen Cropper, Arthur Fraas, and Richard Morgenstern. “Looking Back at Fifty Years of the Clean Air Act”. Harvard Environmental Economics Program Discussion Paper Series.
Aldy, Joseph E., Maximillian Auffhammer, Maureen Cropper, Arthur Fraas, and Richard Morgenstern. “Looking Back at Fifty Years of the Clean Air Act”. Harvard Environmental Economics Program Discussion Paper Series.
Since 1970, transportation, power generation, and manufacturing have dramatically transformed as air pollutant emissions have fallen significantly. To evaluate the causal impacts of the Clean Air Act on these changes, we synthesize and review...
Sunstein, Cass R. “Internalities, Externalities, and Fuel Economy”. Harvard Environmental Economics Program Discussion Paper Series, 2020.
Sunstein, Cass R. “Internalities, Externalities, and Fuel Economy”. Harvard Environmental Economics Program Discussion Paper Series, 2020.
It is standard to think that corrective taxes, responding to externalities, are generally or always better than regulatory mandates, but in the face of behavioral market failures, that conclusion might not be right. Fuel economy and energy efficiency...