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This article uses linked worker-firm data in the United States to estimate the transitional costs associated with reallocating workers from newly regulated industries to other sectors of the economy in the context of new environmental regulations. The focus on workers rather than industries as the unit of analysis allows me to examine previously unobserved economic outcomes such as nonemployment and long-run earnings losses from job transitions, both of which are critical to understanding the reallocative costs associated with these policies. Using plant-level panel variation induced by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA), I find that the reallocative costs of environmental policy are significant. Workers in newly regulated plants experienced, in aggregate, more than $5.4 billion in forgone earnings for the years after the change in policy. Most of these costs are driven by nonemployment and lower earnings in future employment, highlighting the importance of longitudinal data for characterizing the costs and consequences of labor market adjustment. Relative to the estimated benefits of the 1990 CAAA, these one-time transitional costs are small.

Between 1990 and 2008, air pollution emissions from US manufacturing fell by 60 percent despite a substantial increase in manufacturing output. We show that these emissions reductions are primarily driven by within-product changes in emissions intensity rather than changes in output or in the composition of products produced. We then develop and estimate a quantitative model linking trade with the environment to better understand the economic forces driving these changes. Our estimates suggest that the implicit pollution tax that manufacturers face doubled between 1990 and 2008. These changes in environmental regulation, rather than changes in productivity and trade, account for most of the emissions reductions.

This paper uses newly available data on plant level regulatory status linked to the Census Longitudinal Business Database to measure the impact of changes in county level environmental regulations on plant and sector employment levels. Estimates from a variety of specifications suggest a strong connection between changes in environmental regulatory stringency and both employment growth and levels in the affected sectors. The preferred estimates suggest that changes in county level regulatory status due to the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments reduced the size of the regulated sector by as much as 15 percent in the 10 years following the changes.

Regulatory oversight of toxic emissions from industrial plants and understanding about these emissions ' impacts are in their infancy. Applying a research design based on the openings and closings of 1,600 industrial plants to rich data on housing markets and infant health, we find that: toxic air emissions affect air quality only within 1 mile of the plant; plant openings lead to 11 percent declines in housing values within 0.5 mile or a loss of about $ 4.25 million for these households; and a plant's operation is associated with a roughly 3 percent increase in the probability of low birthweight within 1 mile.

We exploit the introduction of electronic toll collection, (E-ZPass), which greatly reduced both traffic congestion and vehicle emissions near highway toll plazas. We show that the introduction of E-ZPass reduced prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2 kilometers (km) of a toll plaza by 10.8 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, relative to mothers 2–10 km from a toll plaza. There were no immediate changes in the characteristics of mothers or in housing prices near toll plazas that could explain these changes. The results are robust to many changes in specification and suggest that traffic congestion contributes significantly to poor health among infants.

We link daily air pollution exposure to measures of contemporaneous health for communities surrounding the twelve largest airports in California. These airports are some of the largest sources of air pollution in the US, and they experience large changes in daily air pollution emissions depending on the amount of time planes spend idling on the tarmac. Excess airplane idling, measured as residual daily taxi time, is due to network delays originating in the Eastern US. This idiosyncratic variation in daily airplane taxi time significantly impacts the health of local residents, largely driven by increased levels of carbon monoxide (CO) exposure. We use this variation in daily airport congestion to estimate the population doseresponse of health outcomes to daily CO exposure, examining hospitalization rates for asthma, respiratory, and heart-related emergency room admissions. A one standard deviation increase in daily pollution levels leads to an additional $ 540 thousand in hospitalization costs for respiratory and heart-related admissions for the 6 million individuals living within 10 km (6.2 miles) of the airports in California. These health effects occur at levels of CO exposure far below existing Environmental Protection Agency mandates, and our results suggest there may be sizable morbidity benefits from lowering the existing CO standard.

We study how changes in energy input costs for US manufacturers affect the relative welfare of manufacturing producers and consumers (i.e., incidence). We also develop a methodology to estimate the incidence of input taxes that accounts for incomplete pass-through, imperfect competition, and substitution among inputs. For the several industries we study, 70 percent of energy price-driven changes in input costs get passed through to consumers in the short to medium run. The share of the welfare cost that consumers bear is 25–75 percent smaller (and the share producers bear is larger) than models featuring complete pass-through and perfect competition would suggest.

This paper examines the long-term impacts of early childhood exposure to air pollution on adult outcomes using US administrative data. We exploit changes in air pollution driven by the 1970 Clean Air Act to analyze the difference in outcomes between cohorts born in counties before and after large improvements in air pollution relative to those same cohorts born in counties that had no improvements. We find a significant relationship between pollution exposure in the year of birth and later-life outcomes. A higher pollution level in the year of birth is associated with lower labor force participation and lower earnings at age 30.

Air quality in the United States has improved dramatically over the past 50 years in large part due to the introduction of the Clean Air Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce it. This article is a reflection on the 50-year anniversary of the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency, describing what economic research says about the ways in which the Clean Air Act has shaped our society—in terms of costs, benefits, and important distributional concerns. We conclude with a discussion of how recent changes to both policy and technology present new opportunities for researchers in this area.

We study how exposure to extreme temperatures in early periods of child development is related to adult economic outcomes measured 30 y later. Our analysis uses administrative earnings records for over 12 million individuals born in the United States between 1969 and 1977, linked to fine-scale, daily weather data and location and date of birth. We calculate the length of time each individual is exposed to different temperatures in utero and in early childhood, and we estimate flexible regression models that allow for nonlinearities in the relationship between temperature and long-run outcomes. We find that an extra day with mean temperatures above 32 °C in utero and in the first year after birth is associated with a 0.1% reduction in adult annual earnings at age 30. Temperature sensitivity is evident in multiple periods of early development, ranging from the first trimester of gestation to age 6–12 mo. We observe that household air-conditioning adoption, which increased dramatically over the time period studied, mitigates nearly all of the estimated temperature sensitivity.