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.
January 14, 10 – 11:30 am
Özgen Kiribrahim, Center for Monetary and Financial Studies (Madrid, Spain)
Place-Based Environmental Regulations and Labor Market Dynamics
Place-based environmental regulations target pollution-intensive sectors in polluted areas. These regulations can improve local quality of life by reducing air pollution, while simultaneously reducing labor demand. I develop a framework to study the heterogeneous effects on worker welfare, considering changes in pollution exposure, sectoral and spatial labor distribution, and unemployment. I focus on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of ozone and fine particulate air pollution during the 2000’s. First, I develop a triple-difference estimator to measure the employment effects on college-educated and non-college-educated workers. I find that, on average, regulation decreased employment by 7.6% among non-college-educated workers and by 3.6% among college-educated workers. However, these average treatment effects vary substantially depending on the intensity and type of regulation. I use this causal evidence to develop empirical moments that serve to identify key parameters of a new general equilibrium search and matching model with endogenous worker location choice and pollution exposure. I use the model to evaluate the welfare effects of regulation in North Carolina. I find the effects differ by worker skill level and geographic location. Low-skill workers in regulated areas experience notable welfare losses. I show these losses can be mitigated by improving labor mobility across sectors and areas.
February 11, 2 – 3:30 pm
Daniel Shawhan, Cornell University, and McKenna Peplinski, Resources for the Future
Power Delayed: Effects of Transmission and Generation Development Delays
The development times for transmission and generation investments have recently lengthened dramatically in the U.S. There are proposals for measures to reduce those development times. Using the Engineering, Economic, and Environmental Simulation Tool (E4ST), the authors have produced an exceptionally realistic simulation study of the effects of lengthy transmission and generation development times. This seminar will summarize the study, including the estimated effects on electricity and natural gas bills, supplier profits, emissions, air quality, premature deaths, and incidence by demographic group. The results have major implications for current concerns about affordability, emissions, and reliability, and for proposed remedies.
March 24, 10 – 11:30 am
Scott Holladay, University of Tennessee
When Regulation Travels: Supply Chain Disruptions and Environmental Spillovers under the Clean Air Act
We study how environmental regulation shapes firms’ supply chains and emissions. Our analysis rests on three key observations: (i) the Clean Air Act imposes geographically and temporally varying stringency, (ii) U.S. firms deeply embedded in supply chains are also concentrated in regulated regions, and (iii) inter-firm linkages transmit both direct and indirect regulatory exposures through business partners. Using detailed U.S. establishment data combined with firm-to-firm linkage information, we distinguish between direct regulatory exposures faced by a firm's own establishments and indirect exposures originating from its suppliers and customers. We find that establishments facing regulatory shocks transmitted through their network counterparts sever ties with regulated partners and face barriers to forming new regulated relationships, with little evidence of substitution toward unregulated ones. While these network adjustments reveal how firms reorganize to mitigate regulatory shocks, they play only a modest role in explaining changes in environmental performance: establishments lower emissions in response to direct and supplier-side regulatory exposures but increase emissions when their customers are regulated---regardless of whether network adjustments are controlled for. The asymmetric responses are consistent with customers’ stronger bargaining power within core relationships, which enables them to shift compliance burdens upstream. Overall, the findings underscore the importance of accounting for indirect regulatory exposures when evaluating both supply chain adjustments and the environmental consequences of regulation.
April 28, 10 – 11:30am
Stephanie Weber, University of Colorado, Boulder
Life on the Road: Technology Adoption, Capital Reallocation, and Environmental Standards in the Commercial Truck Market
This paper considers the life cycle and movement of capital in the heavy-duty trucking context. Over its life, a vehicle may move across firms, industries, and geographies, so vehicle standards that affect the availability and attributes of new and used vehicles will have heterogeneous effects across these buyers and regions. We use federal inspection data from 2000-2021 to track each vehicle’s ownership over time and to estimate a statistical model of scrappage by age, industry, and geography. Using the inspection data and supplementary survey data, we document several patterns: heavy-duty trucks begin life in large, general-freight firms and migrate to small, specialized firms as they age. We also find evidence that new vehicle regulations have long-lived effects on sales, mileage, and scrapping. Finally, we estimate a structural model in which heterogeneous profit maximizing firms make dynamic ownership decisions about new and used vehicles of different ages, and we apply the model to simulate the effects of hypothetical policies.
May 28, 10 – 11:30am
Sarah Armitage, Boston University
Cutting Costs or Cutting Corners: Ownership across the Life Cycle of Oil and Gas Wells
Across the U.S., there are millions of non-producing, unplugged oil and gas wells. Moreover, the majority of oil and gas wells produce very little output, with a median annual revenue below $100,000. Policymakers have increasingly expressed concern about who will pay for end-of-life clean-up costs for this large stock of aging wells. These concerns are exacerbated by the fact that hundreds of thousands of aging wells are owned by small firms who may not be able to afford end-of-life costs. In this context, we document patterns of oil and gas well ownership across the life-cycle. We show that wells are traditionally transferred to progressively smaller firms as they age. We then build a model of well operations, showing that this progression can arise from specialization across firms in well type, but it can also arise as owners sell off to small firms that declare bankruptcy to offload environmental liabilities. We conclude with policy implications related to well plugging, bonding requirements, and decarbonization.