Environmental Economics Seminars
EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE) regularly hosts seminars on timely topics in environmental economics. Researchers from EPA, other federal agencies, and academia present current work, followed by a collegial discussion of this research. Topics are chosen based on relevance to current EPA issues and, more broadly, to issues of concern to the environmental economics research community. These topics include exploration of innovations in economic research methods as well as how research results can be used to improve environmental policy making.
Note: Hosting these seminars does not necessarily express or imply EPA approval or endorsement of the speaker’s views.
Note to media: Seminars are not open to the media. The purpose of all our seminars is to foster the free exchange of information. For media inquiries, please contact the Office of Public Affairs.
Upcoming and Recent Seminars
While subject to change, NCEE generally holds these seminars monthly at EPA headquarters. In-person attendance is typically restricted to EPA employees, but a virtual option is available for all invitees.
If you would like to be added to the distribution list for information about these seminars, please contact NCEE.
September 11, 2 – 3:30pm
Andrew Hutchens, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Parched Power Plants: The Role of Markets & Technology in Power Plants’ Drought Responses
The U.S. electricity sector’s fleet of thermoelectric power plants is vulnerable to extreme weather events whose frequency is being increased by climate change. These plants are especially affected by drought due to their dependence on cooling water. Drought increases plants’ marginal cost of generation by reducing their efficiency. Plants are likely to experience generation effects and adjust their efficiency in order to offset marginal cost increases, but the sign of those generation effects and whether plants actually adjust their efficiency depends on their market’s structure and the extent of drought in their market (or “market drought”). In this paper, we exploit the heterogeneity in wholesale electricity market structure across the U.S. to empirically analyze plant-level drought responses in different market types and market-drought extents using high-resolution data on the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). The high spatial resolution of the PDSI data enables us to calculate plant-level drought treatments, which our fixed effects econometric models then use to estimate drought’s effects on plant-level capacity factor and heat rate. We find that market plants in certain regions experience generation reallocation towards less water-intensive (less costly) natural gas-fired plants and away from water-intensive (more costly) coal-fired plants during drought. Interestingly, we also find that non-market plants experience the same reallocation towards gas-fired plants. Worse drought severity is also shown to intensify these effects. Only Western interconnection market plants improve their efficiency when in drought, while market-drought does not appear to enter plants’ efficiency responses to drought. However, market-drought is found to influence market plants’ capacity factor effects both in and out of drought.
October 9, 10 – 11:30 am
Minwoo Hyun, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Energy Transition and Labor Market Dynamics: Evidence from Worker-Level Microdata
Using matched employer-employee data covering 1.35 million US workers separated from the fossil fuel extraction industry between 1999 and 2019, I estimate how local fossil fuel labor demand shocks affect individual earnings. Workers experience initially modest earnings declines that steadily worsen over the first seven years, driven by adjustments on both intensive and extensive margins, followed by partial long-term recovery. Workers who remain in the fossil fuel sector, disproportionately men in sector-specific roles, experience nearly twice the earnings losses of those who switch sectors, due to limited transferability of specialized skills. Non-switchers who secure new jobs in high-monopsony markets face larger losses, suggesting that their limited alternative employment options enable dominant local employers to weaken their bargaining power. Geographic movers fare worse than stayers, reflecting negative selection (younger, lower-earning) and relocation to metropolitan areas where fossil fuel or low-skilled service sectors remain highly concentrated, leaving monopsony power intact.
December 4, 10 – 11:30 am
Marin Skidmore, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The Heterogeneous Impacts of Wetlands on Water Quality: Implications for Wetland Protection and Policy
Wetlands provide a wealth of ecosystem services, including flood mitigation, wildlife habitat, and a natural ex-post solution to surface water pollution from agricultural runoff (Taylor and Druckenmiller 2022; Karwowski and Skidmore 2025). Thanks to their natural benefits, wetland restoration in the United States is supported by programs including the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program. Additionally, wetlands that are part of the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) are protected under the Clean Water Act. Which wetlands are included in WOTUS has been a legal and policy debate for decades and is currently limited to wetlands directly abutting another surface water feature in WOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States 2023). Yet, there is limited causal evidence on the ecological impact of wetlands based on their surface water connection (Cohen et al. 2016).
We test the impact of restored wetlands on downstream water quality based on the distance from the wetland to the nearest protected surface water feature. We link a rich dataset on all wetlands restored under USDA easement contracts in the Mississippi River Basin, streams and rivers mapped in the National Hydrology Database, and harmonized measures of surface water quality from nearly three decades. We use an upstream-downstream model to evaluate the changes in water quality before and after wetland restoration. We find that non-abutting wetlands within one kilometer of a surface water feature significantly reduce phosphorus and nitrogen concentrations downstream. In contrast, abutting wetlands provide only modest downstream water quality benefits, though water quality is only one of the many ecosystem services that wetlands provide. The effects are most pronounced in the Upper Mississippi region, which is a large contributor to the Gulf Hypoxic Zone (Evenson et al. 2021), and the recipient of significant federal, state, and local resources to reduce nutrient loss (Illinois Environmental Protection Agency et al. 2023; Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship et al. 2025). Our results suggest that wetlands are an effective tool to improve water quality, and considering their heterogeneous benefits could be pivotal in creating optimal policy.