What a mess
The political roots of domestic environmental sabotage
Benjamin Farrer & Graig Klein
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper, we demonstrate that when environmentalist niche parties compete in a given constituency over a number of elections, but continually fail to win seats, then environmental sabotage becomes more frequent in that constituency. When mainstream tactics fail, radical tactics are used more frequently. Using a new data-set on the success rates of all Green Party candidates in US states, we show that environmental sabotage occurs more often when Green Party candidates fail to win even minor offices. This is true even when we control for other political expressions of environmentalism, such as interest group activity, and when we define ‘success’ through votes not seats. We discuss the implications of this for environmental politics, for social movements and democracy, and for political violence in the US.
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The Effect of Air Pollution on Investor Behavior: Evidence from the S&P 500
Anthony Heyes, Matthew Neidell & Soodeh Saberian
NBER Working Paper, October 2016
Abstract:
We provide detailed empirical evidence of a direct effect of air pollution on the efficient operation of the New York Stock Exchange, linking short-term variations in fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in Manhattan to movements in the S&P 500. The effects are substantial – a one standard deviation increases in ambient PM2.5 reduces same-day returns by 11.9% in our preferred specification – and remarkably robust to a variety of specifications and a battery of robustness and falsification checks. Furthermore, the intra-day effects that we observe are difficult to reconcile with competing hypotheses. Despite investors being dispersed geographically we find strong evidence that the effect is strictly local in nature, consistent with the high concentration of market influencers in New York. While we are agnostic as to the underlying mechanism, we provide evidence suggestive of the role of decreased risk tolerance operating through pollution-induced changes in mood or cognitive function.
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Coal Mining and the Resource Curse in the Eastern United States
Stratford Douglas & Anne Walker
Journal of Regional Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We measure the effect of resource-sector dependence on long-run income growth using the natural experiment of coal mining in 409 Appalachian counties selected for homogeneity. Using a panel data set (1970–2010), we find a one standard deviation increase in resource dependence is associated with 0.5–1 percentage point long-run and a 0.2 percentage point short-run decline in the annual growth rate of per capita personal income. We also measure the extent to which the resource curse operates through disincentives to education, and find significant effects, but this “education channel” explains less than 15 percent of the apparent curse.
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Does Craigslist Reduce Waste? Evidence from California and Florida
Anders Fremstad
Ecological Economics, February 2017, Pages 135–143
Abstract:
There is much discussion but little research on the environmental impacts of online platforms associated with the sharing economy. Economic theory suggests that falling transaction costs in secondhand markets increase incentives for people to exchange rather than discard used goods. This paper uses difference-in-difference methods to estimate Craigslist's effect on solid waste by exploiting a natural experiment in how the platform expanded across California and Florida. The econometric results suggest that Craigslist reduced daily per capita solid waste generation by about one third of a pound, though the estimates are not very precise. A plausibility analysis of the weight of items posted on Craigslist concludes that the 200 million annual for-sale posts created by Californians and Floridians can reasonably account for waste reductions of roughly this magnitude.
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Jeremy West et al.
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
A major concern with addressing the negative externalities of gasoline consumption by regulating fuel economy, rather than increasing fuel taxes, is that households respond by driving more. This paper exploits a discrete threshold in the eligibility for Cash for Clunkers to show that fuel economy restrictions lead households to purchase vehicles that have lower cost-per-mile, but are also smaller and lower-performance. Whereas the former effect can increase driving, the latter effect can reduce it. Results indicate that these households do not drive more, suggesting that behavioral responses do not necessarily undermine the effectiveness of fuel economy restrictions at reducing gasoline consumption.
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The Mortality and Medical Costs of Air Pollution: Evidence from Changes in Wind Direction
Tatyana Deryugina et al.
NBER Working Paper, November 2016
Abstract:
We estimate the effect of acute air pollution exposure on mortality, life-years lost, and health care utilization among the US elderly. We address endogeneity and measurement error using a novel instrument for air pollution that strongly predicts changes in fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) concentrations: changes in the local wind direction. Using detailed administrative data on the universe of Medicare beneficiaries, we find that an increase in daily PM 2.5 concentrations increases three-day county-level mortality, hospitalizations, and inpatient spending, and that these effects are not explained by co-transported pollutants like ozone and carbon monoxide. We then develop a new methodology to estimate the number of life-years lost due to PM 2.5. Our estimate is much smaller than one calculated using traditional methods, which do not adequately account for the relatively low life expectancy of those killed by pollution. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that life-years lost due to PM 2.5 varies inversely with individual life expectancy, indicating that unhealthy individuals are disproportionately vulnerable to air pollution. However, the largest aggregate burden is borne by those with medium life expectancy, who are both vulnerable and comprise a large share of the elderly population.
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Family Structure, Residential Mobility, and Environmental Inequality
Liam Downey, Kyle Crowder & Robert Kemp
Journal of Marriage and Family, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study combines micro-level data on families with children from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics with neighborhood-level census and industrial hazard data to examine the association between family structure and residential proximity to neighborhood pollution. Results indicate the existence of significant family structure differences in household proximity to industrial pollution in U.S. metropolitan areas between 1990 and 1999, with single mother and single-father families experiencing neighborhood pollution levels that are on average 46% and 26% greater, respectively, than those experienced by two-parent families. Moreover, the pollution gap between single mother and two-parent families persists with controls for household and neighborhood race, ethnic, socioeconomic, and sociodemographic characteristics. Examination of underlying migration patterns reveals that single-mother, single-father, and two-parent families are equally likely to move in response to pollution but that mobile single-parent families move into neighborhoods with significantly higher pollution levels than do mobile two parent families.
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U.S. Environmental Policy Implementation on Tribal Lands: Trust, Neglect, and Justice
Manuel Teodoro, Mellie Haider & David Switzer
Policy Studies Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study investigates the implementation of U.S. environmental protection laws under American Indian tribal governance. The landmark laws of the 1970s that form the core of America's environmental policy regime made no mention of American Indian tribal lands, and the subsequent research literature on environmental policy has given them little attention. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has primary implementation responsibility for environmental protection laws on tribal lands, which offers a unique opportunity to study direct federal implementation apart from typical joint state–federal implementation. Further, because Indian reservations are homes to a disproportionately poor, historically subjugated racial group, analysis of environmental programs on tribal lands offers a unique perspective on environmental justice. We analyze enforcement of and compliance with the Clean Water Act (CWA) and Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) to compare the implementation of environmental policy on tribal lands with nontribal facilities. Analysis reveals that, compared with nontribal facilities, tribal facilities experience less rigorous CWA and SDWA enforcement and are more likely to violate these laws.
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Potentially Induced Earthquakes during the Early Twentieth Century in the Los Angeles Basin
Susan Hough & Morgan Page
Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent studies have presented evidence that early to mid‐twentieth‐century earthquakes in Oklahoma and Texas were likely induced by fossil fuel production and/or injection of wastewater (Hough and Page, 2015; Frohlich et al., 2016). Considering seismicity from 1935 onward, Hauksson et al. (2015) concluded that there is no evidence for significant induced activity in the greater Los Angeles region between 1935 and the present. To explore a possible association between earthquakes prior to 1935 and oil and gas production, we first revisit the historical catalog and then review contemporary oil industry activities. Although early industry activities did not induce large numbers of earthquakes, we present evidence for an association between the initial oil boom in the greater Los Angeles area and earthquakes between 1915 and 1932, including the damaging 22 June 1920 Inglewood and 8 July 1929 Whittier earthquakes. We further consider whether the 1933 Mw 6.4 Long Beach earthquake might have been induced, and show some evidence that points to a causative relationship between the earthquake and activities in the Huntington Beach oil field. The hypothesis that the Long Beach earthquake was either induced or triggered by an foreshock cannot be ruled out. Our results suggest that significant earthquakes in southern California during the early twentieth century might have been associated with industry practices that are no longer employed (i.e., production without water reinjection), and do not necessarily imply a high likelihood of induced earthquakes at the present time.
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Large numbers of vertebrates began rapid population decline in the late 19th century
Haipeng Li et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Accelerated losses of biodiversity are a hallmark of the current era. Large declines of population size have been widely observed and currently 22,176 species are threatened by extinction. The time at which a threatened species began rapid population decline (RPD) and the rate of RPD provide important clues about the driving forces of population decline and anticipated extinction time. However, these parameters remain unknown for the vast majority of threatened species. Here we analyzed the genetic diversity data of nuclear and mitochondrial loci of 2,764 vertebrate species and found that the mean genetic diversity is lower in threatened species than in related nonthreatened species. Our coalescence-based modeling suggests that in many threatened species the RPD began ∼123 y ago (a 95% confidence interval of 20–260 y). This estimated date coincides with widespread industrialization and a profound change in global living ecosystems over the past two centuries. On average the population size declined by ∼25% every 10 y in a threatened species, and the population size was reduced to ∼5% of its ancestral size. Moreover, the ancestral size of threatened species was, on average, ∼22% smaller than that of nonthreatened species. Because the time period of RPD is short, the cumulative effect of RPD on genetic diversity is still not strong, so that the smaller ancestral size of threatened species may be the major cause of their reduced genetic diversity; RPD explains 24.1–37.5% of the difference in genetic diversity between threatened and nonthreatened species.
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Benjamin Farrer, Robert Holahan & Olga Shvetsova
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, January 2017, Pages 138–150
Abstract:
Common pool resources are frequently analyzed with a simple template: the problem is the tragedy of the commons, and the solution is political institutions. Thus the tragedy of the commons is resolved by governing the commons. In this paper we argue that there is also the possibility of a tragedy of governing the commons. If political institutions lock participants into a certain pattern of resource use, and then there is an exogenous shock − say, a technological change − that increases the risks to one group, then the situation may no longer be a classic common-pool situation and institutions may actually exacerbate, rather than ameliorate distributional conflict. We develop a general model showing that whenever there is heterogeneity in private risks, some technological innovation could potentially turn a previously stable institution into a source of conflict. We take the compelling recent example of horizontal hydrofracturing changing the welfare implications of the institution of compulsory pooling, and use a new individual-level dataset of landowners affected by compulsory pooling in New York to demonstrate the empirical support for our model.
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Is Decoupling GDP Growth from Environmental Impact Possible?
James Ward et al.
PLoS ONE, October 2016
Abstract:
The argument that human society can decouple economic growth — defined as growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — from growth in environmental impacts is appealing. If such decoupling is possible, it means that GDP growth is a sustainable societal goal. Here we show that the decoupling concept can be interpreted using an easily understood model of economic growth and environmental impact. The simple model is compared to historical data and modelled projections to demonstrate that growth in GDP ultimately cannot be decoupled from growth in material and energy use. It is therefore misleading to develop growth-oriented policy around the expectation that decoupling is possible. We also note that GDP is increasingly seen as a poor proxy for societal wellbeing. GDP growth is therefore a questionable societal goal. Society can sustainably improve wellbeing, including the wellbeing of its natural assets, but only by discarding GDP growth as the goal in favor of more comprehensive measures of societal wellbeing.
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Environmental Jobs and Growth in the United States
Robert Elliott & Joanne Lindley
Ecological Economics, February 2017, Pages 232–244
Abstract:
Green growth is increasingly being seen as a means of simultaneously meeting current and future climate change obligations and reducing unemployment. This paper uses detailed industry-level data from the Bureau of Labor Statistic's Green Goods and Services survey to examine how the provision of so-called green goods and services has affected various aspects of the US economy. Our descriptive results reveal that those states and industries that were relatively green in 2010 became even greener in 2011. To investigate further we include green goods and services in a production function. The results show that between 2010 and 2011 industries that have increased their share of green employment have reduced their productivity although this negative correlation was only for the manufacture of green goods and not for the supply of green services. In further analysis we investigate skill-technology complementarities in the production of green goods and services and show that industries that increased their provision of green goods and services grew more slowly, reduced their expenditure on technology inputs and increased their demand for medium educated workers, whilst simultaneously reducing their demand for lower skilled workers.
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Egregiousness and Boycott Intensity: Evidence from the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
Zhongmin Wang, Alvin Lee & Michael Polonsky
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Consumer boycotts are triggered by egregious events, but the literature has not distinguished the level of egregiousness from consumers’ preferences or disutility associated with a given level of egregiousness, nor has the literature studied how these two components of egregiousness affect boycott intensity. We provide a model of market-level boycotts that distinguishes the two egregiousness components. Consistent with the predictions of our model, the market-level intensity of consumer boycotting of BP-branded gasoline, which was triggered by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, increased with the spill’s egregiousness level, approximated by the officially reported daily amount of oil leaked into the ocean and by other measures (i.e., the duration of the spill and the intensity of media coverage), and with consumers’ disutility from egregiousness, approximated by an area’s environmentalism and its proximity to the Gulf of Mexico.
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JoyAnna Hopper
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
In 15 American states, environmental protection agencies perform both pollution-control and natural resource conservation functions. In this study, I examine how this combination of functions affects the regulatory style embraced by these agencies. I find, through interviews with environmental agency workers and empirical analyses using enforcement data from 2010 to 2014, that the cooperation and flexibility with industry inherent to natural resource conservation efforts is a fundamental part of the regulatory process within these combined agencies. Great efforts are made to garner voluntary or negotiated compliance without the possible economic consequences of punitive actions. Enforcements are less frequent and less severe. The effect of this agency design choice is powerful, maintaining its effect even when controlling for political, ideological, and economical pressures. In a time where environmental protection agencies are increasingly interested in incorporating management-based regulation and voluntary compliance to supplement command and control regulation, it is more important than ever to understand the regulation that emerges from this combination.
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Temporal displacement of environmental crime. Evidence from marine oil pollution
Ben Vollaard
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
We provide evidence for temporal displacement of illegal discharges of oil from shipping, a major source of ocean pollution, in response to a monitoring technology that features variation in the probability of conviction by time of day. During the nighttime, evidence collected by Coast Guard aircraft using radar becomes contestable in court because the nature of an identified spot cannot be verified visually by an observer on board of the aircraft. Seasonal variation in time of sunset is used to distinguish evasive behavior from daily routines on board. Using data from surveillance flights above the Dutch part of the North Sea during 1992–2011, we provide evidence for a sudden increase in illegal discharges right after sunset across the year. Our results show that even a tiny chance of getting caught and a mild punishment can have a major impact on behavior.
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Too Burdensome to Bid: Transaction Costs and Pay-for-Performance Conservation
Leah Palm-Forster et al.
American Journal of Agricultural Economics, October 2016, Pages 1314-1333
Abstract:
In a world free of transaction costs, reverse auctions have the potential to cost-effectively allocate payment for environmental service contracts by targeting projects that provide the most benefit per dollar spent. However, auctions only succeed if enough farmers choose to bid so that the auctioneer can evaluate numerous projects for targeted funding. A 2014 conservation auction to allocate payments for practices that reduce phosphorus runoff in Northwest Ohio experienced very thin bidding. According to a follow-up survey, auction participation was deterred by the perceived complexity of the bidding process and the need to negotiate with renters. Due to low participation, the actual conservation auction made payments for phosphorus reduction that were surprisingly costly at the margin. Applying a farmer behavioral model to the Western Lake Erie Basin, we simulate participation choice and cost-effectiveness of environmental outcomes in reverse auctions and uniform payment conservation programs. Results reveal that when perceived transaction costs of bid preparation are high, reverse auctions can be less cost-effective than spatially targeted, uniform payment programs that attract higher participation.