Essays in Public Health, Energy and Environmental Economics PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Essays in Public Health, Energy and Environmental Economics PDF full book. Access full book title Essays in Public Health, Energy and Environmental Economics by Becky A. Lafrancois. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Becky A. Lafrancois
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781124288345
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 127
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Becky A. Lafrancois
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781124288345
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 127
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Arthur Alexius van Benthem
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book Here
Book Description
This dissertation consists of three essays in energy and environmental economics that all have a bearing on various concepts from public economics. The first essay uses fiscal data on 2,468 oil extraction agreements in 38 countries to study tax contracts between resource-rich countries and independent oil companies. We analyze why expropriations occur and what determines the degree of oil price exposure of host countries. We show theoretically and verify empirically that oil price insurance provided by tax contracts is increasing in a country's cost of expropriation, and decreasing in its production expertise. The second essay reveals significant unintended consequences from recent 14-state efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through emissions limits per mile from new cars. While such efforts significantly reduce emissions from new cars sold in the adopting states, they cause substantial emissions increases from new cars sold in other (non-adopting) states and from used cars. Such offsets (or "leakage") reflect interactions between the state-level and federal fuel-economy standards: the state-level efforts loosen the national standard, so that automakers can profitably increase sales of high-emissions vehicles in non-adopting states. Our simulation model estimates that leakage associated with recent legislation is 65-74%. In the third essay, I analyze speed limits. When choosing his speed, a driver faces a trade-off between private benefits (time savings) and private costs (fuel cost and own damage and injury). Driving faster also has external costs (pollution, adverse health impacts and injury to other drivers). I use large-scale speed limit increases in the western United States in 1987 and 1996 to address three related questions. First, do the social benefits of raising speed limits exceed the social (private plus external) costs? Second, do the private benefits of driving faster as a result of higher speed limits exceed the private costs? Third, could completely eliminating speed limits improve efficiency? I find that a 10 mph speed limit increase on highways leads to a 3-4 mph increase in travel speed, 9-15% more accidents, 34-60% more fatal accidents, and elevated pollutant concentrations of 14-25% (carbon monoxide), 9-16% (nitrogen oxides), 1-11% (ozone) and 9% higher fetal death rates around the affected freeways. I use these estimates to calculate private and external benefits and costs, and find that the social costs of speed limit increases are three to ten times larger than the social benefits. In contrast, many individual drivers would enjoy a net private benefit from driving faster. The substantial difference between private and social optimal speed choices provides a strong rationale for having speed limits.
Author: Michael Redlinger
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Environmental economics
Languages : en
Pages : 134
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Sul-Ki Lee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Coal
Languages : en
Pages : 97
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Toby Craig Jones
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813569966
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 112
Get Book Here
Book Description
The world’s water is under siege. A combination of corporate greed, the elite pursuit of political power, and our unrelenting reliance on carbon-based energy is accerlating a broad range of environmental and political crises. Potentially catastrophic climate change, driven primarily by the consumption of oil and gas, threatens the environment in a variety of ways, including producing unprecedented patterns of heavy weather and superstorms in some places and droughts in others. Alongside intensifying environmental dangers posed by our reliance on carbon energy, the conditions of modern life, from happiness to the possibility of democratic politics, are also being undermined. In Running Dry, historian Toby Craig Jones explores how modern society’s unquenchable thirst for carbon-based energy is endangering the environment broadly, as well as the historical roots of this threat. This accessible book examines the history of the "energy-water nexus," the ways in which oil and gas extraction poison and dry up water resources, the role of corporate "science" in deflecting attention away from the emerging crises, and the ways in which the rush to capture more energy is also challenging America's democratic order.
Author: Jin Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book Here
Book Description
Essays in Energy and Environmental Economics.
Author: Dale S. Rothman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 270
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Joshua Blonz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 167
Get Book Here
Book Description
This dissertation combines research on three topics in applied Energy and Environmental Economics related to the electricity industry. In the first paper, I study the economic welfare impact of an electricity pricing program that increases the price of electricity for small commercial and industrial customers when the cost of generation is high. The second paper explores an energy efficiency retrofit program that provides free upgrades to low-income households in California. Both of these policy interventions were a result of orders from the California Public Utilities Commission, the energy regulator in California. The final paper examines the cost of air quality regulations on employment in the coal mining sector in Appalachia. These three papers study different important aspects of the electricity sector, from upstream regulation of generation to end use pricing and consumption efficiency. In the first chapter, I study how in electricity markets, the price paid by retail customers during periods of peak demand is far below the cost of supply. This leads to overconsumption during peak periods, requiring the construction of excess generation capacity compared to first-best prices that adjust at short time intervals to reflect changing marginal cost. In this paper, I investigate a second-best policy designed to address this distortion, and compare its effectiveness to the first-best. The policy allows the electricity provider to raise retail price by a set amount (usually 3 to 5 times) during the afternoon hours of a limited number of summer days (usually 9 to 15). Using a quasi-experimental research design and high-frequency electricity consumption data, I test the extent to which small commercial and industrial establishments respond to this temporary increase in retail electricity prices. I find that establishments reduce their peak usage by 13.4% during peak hours. Using a model of capacity investment decisions, these reductions yield $154 million in welfare benefits, driven largely by reduced expenditures on power plant construction. I find the current policy provides of the first-best benefits but that, with improvements in targeting just the days with the highest demand, a modified peak pricing program could achieve 80% welfare gains relative to the first-best pricing policy. In the second chapter, I study energy efficiency retrofits programs, which are increasingly being used to both save on energy bills and as a carbon mitigation strategy. This paper evaluates the California Energy Savings Assistance program, which provides no-cost upgrades to low-income households across the state. I use quasi-experimental variation in program uptake to measure energy savings for a large portion of the treated population in the San Diego Gas & Electric service territory between 2007 and 2012. The results suggest that the overall program is ineffective at delivering energy savings and is not cost-effective. One challenge in implementing efficiency retrofit programs is that each upgrade must be customized to the housing unit on which it is installed. As a consequence, there is a wide range in efficiency upgrade potential across the population of candidate households. To better understand this heterogeneity in measure installation and its potential to drive program outcomes, I use discontinuities in program rules to identify key measure specific savings. This analysis shows that larger upgrades such as refrigerator replacements do provide cost-effective savings when considering the full set of social benefits. Households that do not receive larger upgrades generally see little or no savings. These results suggest that heterogeneity in upgrade potential can drive overall program outcomes when only a small portion of the treated population is eligible for cost-effective efficiency upgrades. In the third chapter, I study the costs of Title IV of the Clean Air Act. This regulation put a cap on sulfur emissions from electric power plants, which reduced the demand for high-sulfur coal. Using a quasi-experimental research design, I estimate how coal mine employment and production in high-sulfur coal-producing counties were impacted by the regulation by comparing them to neighboring counties that produced low-sulfur coal. I find that coal production dropped by 20% and coal sector employment dropped by 14%. I find no evidence of spillovers to employment or wages in the non-coal sectors of the high-sulfur coal counties. The results suggest that the coal sector employment costs of Title IV of the Clean Air Act are highly concentrated in the coal industry, and that the decline does not detectably impact the overall regional economy.
Author: Catherine Helena Hausman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 114
Get Book Here
Book Description
Energy production is associated with a number of significant environmental externalities. For instance, coal-fired power plants emit both local pollutants (such as particulate matter and sulphur dioxide) and the global pollutant carbon dioxide. This creates a need for government intervention: left to their own devices, energy producers will do more environmental damage than is socially optimal. The choices faced by policy-makers in regulating the energy industry are, however, rarely clear. Government regulators must trade off the externalities caused by different types of energy production. While nuclear power generation does not emit carbon dioxide, there is the risk of significant environmental damage in the event of a nuclear meltdown. While many proponents of biofuels hoped that replacing fossil fuels with biofuels would decrease carbon dioxide emissions, land-use changes associated with biofuels production can cause environmental damage. These trade-offs motivate the chapters of this dissertation. In the first chapter, I study changes to nuclear power safety following major regulatory changes in electricity markets. Following electricity market restructuring, approximately half of all commercial U.S. nuclear power reactors were sold by price-regulated public utilities to independent power producers. At the time of the sales, some policy-makers raised concerns that these corporations would ignore safety. Others claimed that the sales would bring improved reactor management, with positive effects on safety. Using data on various safety measures and a difference-in-difference estimation strategy, I find that safety improved following ownership transfers and the removal of price regulations. Generation increased, and this does not appear to have come at the cost of public safety. This paper contributes to several strands of the energy literature. First, it fits in with the literature on electricity deregulation. While this literature has considered a broad set of outcomes, my paper is the first to look closely at safety, an outcome of particular interest for nuclear energy. In line with that, it also contributes to the literature on nuclear safety, which has been of particular interest given accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Finally, my work is germane to the literature on the consequences of deregulation for outcomes beyond private efficiency gains. While there is now some consensus that deregulation can lead to the alignment of private costs and thus to efficiency gains, less is known about the effect on external costs. Papers in this literature are necessarily industry-specific: the interaction of private cost reductions with changes to quality or changes to external costs is highly context-dependent. However, this paper provides intuition for the mechanisms at work, some of which are generalizable beyond the nuclear power industry. In the second and third chapters, I study land-use changes relating to biofuels production. Transportation in the U.S. accounts for a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions. Motor gasoline, excluding ethanol, accounts for around 20 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, or over 1 billion metric tons each year. Biofuels have been promoted as an alternative to petroleum products that bypasses some of the fundamental problems with the oil market: supporters claim that it is renewable (whereas conventional oil is exhaustible), produced in the U.S. (as opposed to regimes in some cases unfriendly to the U.S.), and carbon-friendly. As the acreage devoted to biofuels crop production expands, however, it can compete with cropland used for food or with natural ecosystems. In the second chapter, joint with Maximilian Auffhammer and Peter Berck, I examine price impacts of biofuels production. The last ten years have seen tremendous expansion in biofuels production, particularly in corn ethanol in the United States, at the same time that commodity prices (e.g., corn) have experienced significant spikes. While supporters claim that biofuels are renewable and carbon-friendly, concerns have been raised about their impacts on land use and food prices. This paper analyzes how U.S. crop prices have responded to shocks in acreage supply; these shocks can be thought of as a shock to the residual supply of corn for food. Using a structural vector auto-regression framework, we examine shocks to a crop's own acreage and to total cropland. This allows us to estimate the effect of dedicating cropland or non-crop farmlands to biofuels feedstock production. A negative shock in own acreage leads to an increase in price for soybeans and corn. Our calculations show that increased corn ethanol production during the boom production year 2006/2007 explains approximately 27 percent of the experienced corn price rise. In the final chapter, I study land-use change in Brazil arising from biofuels production. Scientists and economists are increasingly worried that biofuels production is leading to deforestation, and hence loss of habitats and increased carbon dioxide emissions. I estimate land use changes in response to shocks in sugarcane (a biofuels feedstock) and soybean (thought to be affected by United States corn ethanol production) prices in Brazil at a national and regional level. Using county-level data from 1973 to 2005, I consider a dynamic panel data model of input demand for land, conditioning on price changes of other commodities. Unlike the existing literature, I apply a dynamic panel data estimator that is unbiased (unlike OLS with fixed effects) and more precise than GMM. The short-run price elasticity of sugarcane acreage in Brazil is estimated to be approximately zero, whereas the elasticity of soybean acreage is 0.9 when both spot and futures prices change. The regional estimates for soybeans show considerable variation, and are highest in areas of ecological importance, such as the cerrado. Sugarcane estimates are more homogeneous. These results should be taken into account in impact assessments of biofuels.
Author: James Michael Gillan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 162
Get Book Here
Book Description
The coming century will bring numerous environmental challenges and understanding the strategic decisions involved in energy production and consumption will be central to addressing them effectively. In this dissertation, I use methods from applied econometrics, behavioral economics, and industrial organization to investigate various lines of inquiry around this broader motivation. In Chapter 1, I study how residential electricity consumers respond to increasingly complicated incentives that are meant to improve allocative efficiency and test whether their behavior is consistent with standard models. In Chapter 2, I estimate the impact of temperature on high school students' standardized test performance in order to understand how environmental factors affect educational outcomes. In Chapter 3, I evaluate a targeting strategy meant to improve the efficiency of an electricity pricing program and develop a theoretical framework to ground the findings. The first chapter studies whether consumers are attentive to time-varying incentives to reduce electricity consumption. Dynamic pricing models typically assume that consumers respond to marginal incentives. I use a field experiment to assess the impact of dynamic pricing on residential electricity consumption and find strong evidence of inattention. I propose a model to interpret the results which suggests that the benefits of dynamic pricing may be substantively undermined by inattention. I also explore the role of automation in dynamic pricing, which holds the promise of reducing the cognitive choice frictions that cause inattention and lowering the effort cost of responding to price changes. I report three primary findings. First, households--both with and without automation--significantly respond to a short term price increase by reducing consumption. Second, responses are very insensitive to the size of the price change. A price increase of 31 percent causes consumption to fall by 12 percent on average, whereas a price increase of 1,875 percent causes an average reduction of 14 percent. Third, automation causes responses that are more than three times larger than the average effect, but are still insensitive to the price level. The results suggest that households use simplifying heuristics when facing dynamic prices and that automation reduces effort costs, but does not resolve inattention. I apply the model to recover bounds on the price elasticity of demand and shed light on the potential attention costs of dynamic pricing. The second chapter, coauthored with Maximilian Auffhammer and Catherine Wolfram, studies the impacts of extreme temperature on over 5 million students standardized test performance. We exploit plausibly exogenous year-to-year within-school daily weather variation in order to measure the contemporaneous effect of maximum outdoor temperature on aggregate student performance. The exam studied is the California High School Exit Exam, a state-wide standardized test that evaluates high school students' mathematics and English-language arts aptitude and was a requirement for receiving a diploma from 2006-2015. We document a nonlinear relationship between temperature and performance. Temperatures above 27.5$^\circ$C show statistically significant negative impact on pass rates in both subjects and scores in the math assessment. We also document heterogeneity in the effect by income in the area surrounding the school and find more pronounced effects for schools in the lowest income quartile. The third chapter, coauthored with Maximilian Balandat and Datong Zhou, evaluates the effect of targeting based on heterogeneous treatment effects using an experiment. We provide a theoretical framework for how various factors undermining external validity affect targeting and the how experimental evaluation of targeting can be used to parse competing mechanisms. Our theoretical framework distinguishes between group-level heterogeneity as defined by covariates and subject-level effects we call individual treatment effects (ITEs). ITEs can only be gleaned through observing program participation using panel data, but capture additional effect heterogeneity within the group-level effects. We partnered with a energy technology company in order to examine the impact using ITEs to target in the field. We find our targeting strategy reduces the costs of the partner by 52 percent and the results are highly significant. The strategy also reduces revenue by 24 percent, indicating an overall increase in profit on the order of 28 percent. We also examine the persistence of the effects and find the cost savings begin to diminish only 60 days after deployment of the targeting strategy. These findings suggest significant potential for reducing the cost of the program, but only in the short-term. Importantly, the experimental evaluation allows us to understand its performance without having to rely on the common practice of conducting ex-post simulations.
