Historically, improvements in municipal water quality led to substantial mortality decline today’s wealthy countries. However, disinfection has not consistently produced large benefits lower-income We study this issue by analyzing a large-scale program Mexico that increased chlorination coverage urban areas from 58 percent over 90 within 18 months. estimate the reduced childhood diarrheal disea...

Electric vehicles have a unique potential to transform personal transportation. We analyze this transition with dynamic model capturing falling costs of electric vehicles, decreasing pollution from electricity, and increasing vehicle substitutability. Our calibration the US market shows gasoline is not optimal at current substitutability: production ban would large deadweight loss. At higher su...

We examine the introduction of automatic air pollution monitoring to counter suspected tampering at local level, a central feature China’s “war on pollution.” Exploiting 654 regression discontinuity designs based city-level variation in day that was automated, we find an immediate and lasting increase 35 percent reported PM 10 concentrations post-automation. Moreover, automation’s increased onl...

Leaded gasoline is still used globally for aviation and automotive racing. Exploiting regulatory exemptions a novel quasi-experiment, we find that leaded use in racing increases ambient lead, elevated blood lead rates, elderly mortality. The mortality estimates indicate each gram of added to exceeds $1,100 damages. Our setting allows us rule out potential confounders, such as correlated polluta...

We synthesize and review retrospective analyses of federal air quality regulations to examine the contributions Clean Air Act (CAA) vast improvements seen since 1970. Geographic heterogeneity in stringency affects emissions, public health, compliance costs, employment. Cap-and-trade has delivered greater emission reductions at lower cost than conventional mandates, yet fallen short textbook ide...

Concerns for environmental quality and its impact on people’s welfare are fundamental arguments for the adoption of environmental legislation in most countries. In this paper, we analyse the relationship between air quality and subjective well-being in Europe. We use a unique dataset that merges three waves of the European Social Survey with a new dataset on environmental quality including SO2 ...

Anaerobic digestion technology addresses environmental issues of waste disposal and greenhouse gas emission reduction. This paper examines attitudes toward adoption of this conservation technology on dairy farms. To specify an appropriate dependent variable without a large number of adopters, an ordered probit model is constructed. The empirical analysis uses data from a 2006 survey of Pacific ...

Virtually all U.S. states have now created voluntary cleanup programs (VCPs), offering liability relief and other incentives for responsible parties to remediate contaminated sites. We use a multinomial probit model to analyze participation in Oregon’s two VCPs. In contrast to previous VCP research, we find that these programs attract sites with significant contamination, not just clean ones. F...

Designing an emissions trading scheme requires in-depth knowledge about several aspects. This paper attempts to clarify some important design points of the forthcoming emissions trading scheme for aviation under the EU ETS. Five general key points of system design are acknowledged and comparisons are made to previous and current emission trading schemes. Above all, it is argued that initial all...

Using the most comprehensive developing country dataset ever compiled on air and water pollution and environmental regulations, the paper assesses India’s environmental regulations with a difference-in-differences design. The air pollution regulations are associated with substantial improvements in air quality. The most successful air regulation resulted in a modest but statistically insignific...