Essays In Environmental And Energy Economics
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Essays On Environmental And Energy Economics
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Author :
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2014
Essays On Environmental And Energy Economics written by and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014 with categories.
Essays In Environmental And Energy Economics
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Author : Rémi Morin Chassé
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2016
Essays In Environmental And Energy Economics written by Rémi Morin Chassé and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016 with Capital categories.
In the first essay, we consider a firm with limited-liability and whose profits are a function of valuable productive capital. Environmental accidents of random sizes can occur at random times. To pay for the liability from an accident, the firm sells some or all of its productive capital; it becomes judgment-proof when the liability exceeds the value of its capital. The remainder of the liability, left unpaid by the bankrupted firm, is paid for by society. Using a dynamic framework with exogenous arrival, we derive closed-form solutions for the firm's return from its assets and for social costs. The firm's return is convex in the level of productive capital. By setting up a bonding requirement, the legislator ensures the firm, not society, bears the expected costs of accidents ex-ante. It may optimal to reduce the liability transferred back to the firm and possibly to subsidize it. When arrival is endogenous, there can be an optimal firm-size for specific cases. The associated social costs reach a maximum when assets equal the expected magnitude of damages. In the second essay, we study sustainability using a neoclassical growth approach. Our analysis focuses on the role of energy in the economy. Society uses renewable and non-renewable energies, with the use of the latter generating undesirable pollution. Renewable energies, available at zero marginal cost, are conditional upon the existence of a generating capacity, which requires investment. In a numerical simulation, we find that it can be optimal for society to stop using non-renewable energies and switch completely to renewable energies even though the non-renewable resource stock is not fully exhausted. In the final carbon-free phase, the dynamic system is a saddle-path. We find that a moratorium on renewable resource expansion is not beneficial; society is better off investing in this resource every year, albeit at a lower rate, than to postpone investment. Society must be relatively averse to intergeneration inequity with an elasticity of inter-temporal substitution must be greater than one to ensure that the steady-state level of renewable energy capacity is non-zero.
Essays In Environmental And Energy Economics
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Author : Benjamin Paul Leard
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2014
Essays In Environmental And Energy Economics written by Benjamin Paul Leard and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014 with categories.
Traditional studies in economics assume that decision makers are homogeneous. Although this assumption simplifies analysis, modeling decision maker heterogeneity yields insights about consumer or producer behavior that provide policy makers with efficient policy designs. In my dissertation, I analyze how decision maker heterogeneity influences the efficiency of instrument choice in environmental and energy policies. In my first chapter, I consider the efficacy of different policies for increasing fuel economy when households are heterogeneous in how they value gasoline costs when buying a new vehicle. I find that designing policies to target households that undervalue fuel costs can reduce compliance costs of energy efficiency programs in the transportation sector. In my second and third chapters, I evaluate the efficacy of alternative instruments for alleviating adverse selection in markets for carbon offsets when potential projects have heterogeneous characteristics. In these essays, I find that the most efficient policies directly attack the adverse selection problem by lowering baselines to all projects. This is because conservative baselines lead to fewer projects being over-credited and to more projects being under-credited. Taken together, my essays push forward the literature on instrument choice in the face of decision maker heterogeneity and yield general insights for designing sound environmental and energy policy.
Essays In Environmental And Energy Economics
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Author :
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2014
Essays In Environmental And Energy Economics written by and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014 with categories.
Chapter 1: I measure the impact of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendment on the productivity and output of US coal-fired power generating units. The Act led to power units adopting a number of different pollution abating behaviors, one of which was an input change to lower SO2 emitting coal. A key feature of coal generating units is each one is designed to burn a particular variety of coal, with significant deviations from the targeted coal characteristics resulting in productivity loss. The main innovation is to quantify the effect that switching to cleaner coal had on productivity, output and generation costs. With data spanning over twenty one years, I first compute the unconstrained coal type of each unit and document ensuing deviations caused by switching to cleaner coal. I then incorporate the effect of this deviation directly into a production function to explicitly quantify the resulting productivity loss. Chapter 2: Since the 1990-CAAA was implemented and a market for SO2 emission permits was established, coal-fired power generating units have had to choose among three main compliance alternatives: i) burn high-sulfur coal and buy additional permits to cover the excess emissions, ii) retrofit the boiler and convert it to low-sulfur coal, or iii) adopt a flue gas desulfurization unit (scrubber). The decision problem has dynamic implications driven by the evolution of input, output, and allowance prices and is revised whenever significant changes in the industry occur. I assume output level is randomly and exogenously assigned to each boiler and estimate a structural dynamic discrete choice model to recover the relative compliance costs. Chapter 3: We study a cycle of subsidized energy prices and estimate its welfare impact on households in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Region. A simple framework explains its emergence in terms of the preference of a median household (voter) for receiving transfer gains followed by a future flow of transfer losses. We evaluate actual transfers and welfare effects that a departure of prices of natural gas and electricity generation from opportunity costs since 2003 had on households, and explore the impact of a way back to opportunity cost pricing.
Essays In Environmental And Energy Economics
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Author : Joshua Blonz
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2005
Essays In Environmental And Energy Economics written by Joshua Blonz and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2005 with categories.
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.
Three Essays On Environmental And Energy Economics
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Author : Onur Sapci
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2014
Three Essays On Environmental And Energy Economics written by Onur Sapci and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014 with Energy conservation categories.
As the economies develop and industrialize, the impact of economic activities on the environment increased, and modern environmental concerns arose. Today most of the countries regulate environmental degradation to some extent. The principal motivation for environmental regulation is the protection of human health. The importance of health and human capital as an engine for economic growth is well-known. Chapter 1 investigates the role of environmental conditions on the link between health and human capital. Factors that reduce the human capital investments distort the economy and impede growth. One key factor that has been under-explored is the interaction of environmental degradation with human capital investments. We know less about how human capital is linked with growth via environmental degradation. This linkage between economic growth and the interaction of environmental degradation with human capital investments matters because if environmental degradation reduces human capital investments, economic growth is slower. This study is among the first to explore the direct impact of pollution on human capital in an economic growth setting. The literature has not addressed how growth-driven environmental degradation has affected human capital--a critical component of economic growth. Chapter 1 presents a two-sector endogenous growth model (AK model) with an environmental externality on human capital. This chapter incorporates the health impacts from the environment on human capital investments and show that the interaction of pollution with human capital investments reduces the optimal growth rate. But when the household ignores the health impacts the resulting growth rate is suboptimal, it is faster than the optimal, and riskier to human health. To achieve efficiency, a Pigouvian tax is proposed. An optimal emissions tax on the firm`s production achieves the socially optimal growth rate. Chapter 2 considers an empirical examination of the proposition on the interaction between environmental degradation and human capital on growth. Using US state-level data, the empirical results support the model of Chapter 1--the interaction between the health impacts of environmental degradation and human capital significantly reduces the growth of real GDP. The results suggest that a 1.03% increase in average annual NOx emissions (1000 metric tons) or a 0.47% increase in average annual SO2 emissions (1000 metric tons) lowers the growth rate by 0.0012 through negative health impacts on human capital. This impact intensifies with a substantial increase in emissions or with pollution accumulation over a long time span. Chapter 3 explores the impact of energy conservation programs on the residential electricity use. Part A of chapter 3 examines the effectiveness of home energy audits conducted by Lower Valley Energy (LVE) in Teton County, Wyoming. These audits assess the energy efficiency of existing structures and propose modifications to reduce electricity consumption. This study examines the factors that influence households to adopt the modifications recommended by the audits and whether these audits lead to significant reductions in electricity use. Using data collected by LVE, household decisions after the audits are recorded along with the corresponding recommended modifications and the offers for co-funding from LVE. A discrete choice model of the household decision after the audit is estimated. The results indicate that the potential improvement in heating efficiency from the proposed modifications increase the probability of implementing an electricity conservation modification in the house. Co-funding offers also significantly raise the odds of accepting the modifications but are relatively less important than anticipated efficiency improvements. Electricity demand models are estimated using data two years before and after each household audit. For households who decide to modify their houses after the audit, monthly average electricity use per square foot decreases 6.6%. While there is an estimated 1.5% reduction in electricity use attributed to the audit by households who decided not to adopt the proposed modifications, this reduction is not statistically significant, casting doubt on the presence of modifications in behavior from the audit information itself. On balance for all households audited, the econometric results suggest that the LVE home energy audit program reduced household electricity use 4.1%. Part B of Chapter 3 presents findings from a large scale household survey. This section provides empirical support that clarifies the mixed results about the connection between household environmental attitudes and real energy consumption behavior. This study combines actual electricity use of 612 households and their opinions, perceptions and attitudes to several environmental issues. The results show that households reflect their stated preferences about environmental issues on their energy use. Environmental attitudes have a direct and observable effect on energy consumption behavior. Environmentally concerned households tend to be more conservative on energy use. These results suggest that the link between household environmental attitudes and patterns of energy consumption is strong.
Essays In Environmental And Energy Economics
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Author : Xueying Lu
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2019
Essays In Environmental And Energy Economics written by Xueying Lu and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019 with categories.
Chapter 1 investigates the distributional impacts of a unique car purchase lottery in Beijing on the housing market. I use a difference-in-differences approach to compare heterogeneous neighborhoods before and after implementation of the policy. At an aggregate scale, housing prices within Beijng's fourth ring road increase by 1 to 2% while those outside the fifth ring road decrease by 5%. This is equivalent to transferring about 115,000 RMB ($17,000) from each apartment owner outside the fifth ring to those within the fourth ring. The disaggregate effects are even more pronounced: housing prices increase at locations close to common destinations (employment centers: 5%; primary schools: 3%) and alternative transportation (subway: 3%; buses: 4%). These changes reflect capitalization of the automobile policy and imply a large, and likely unexpected, redistribution across homeowners. The results are relevant to policy, both in the context of unintended consequences and for efforts to develop offsetting measures. Chapter 2 uses the roll-out of a large transmission expansion in Texas' electricity market to measure the market and non-market impacts of the transmission expansion on benefits of increased renewable capacity. We find large market benefits leading to a payback period of roughly 14 years. However, total welfare improvements from reduced congestion depend on how global non-market externalities are internalized by regional policy makers: accounting for non-market externalities reduces the payback period of this project from 14 to less than 9 years. We discuss the finding's implications for the welfare of regional decisions to build transmission capacity for the U.S. wholesale electricity market in response to federal renewable subsidies. Chapter 3 investigates the impact of extreme temperature on risk by leveraging daily temperature variation with sales of a "risky" good--Powerball tickets. Temperature and shopping trips are connected through avoidance behavior, leading me to jointly consider trips to retail stores in the analysis. The results show that sales of the risky good per trip increase substantially with temperature, demonstrating a novel dimension in the connection between temperature extremes and human behavior.
Essays In Energy Economics And Environmental Regulation
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Author : Andrea La Nauze
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2016
Essays In Energy Economics And Environmental Regulation written by Andrea La Nauze and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016 with Electric power distribution categories.
Bioeconomics And Sustainability
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Author : Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
language : en
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Release Date : 1999-01-01
Bioeconomics And Sustainability written by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and has been published by Edward Elgar Publishing this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1999-01-01 with Business & Economics categories.
Economists from around the world discuss Georgescu-Roegen's (1906-94) theories in a number of areas, but especially on environmental and energy economics. They address such topics as how long neoclassical economists can continue to ignore his contribu
Three Essays On Environmental Economics
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Author : Dale S. Rothman
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 1993
Three Essays On Environmental Economics written by Dale S. Rothman and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1993 with categories.