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"Wolverton, Ann"
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Breaking In
By showcasing the stories of eight women scientists who have achieved successful careers in the academy, industry, and government, Breaking In offers vivid insights into the challenges and barriers that women face in entering STEM while also describing these women's motivations, the choices they made along their paths, and the intellectual satisfactions and excitement of scientific discovery they derive from their work.
Breaking In underscores issues aspiring women scientists will encounter on their journeys and what they can do to forestall potential obstacles, advocate for change, and fulfill their ambitions.
eBook
Factors Influencing Customer Participation in a Program to Replace Lead Pipes for Drinking Water
Many public water systems are struggling to locate and replace lead pipes that distribute drinking water across the United States. This study investigates factors associated with customer participation in a voluntary lead service line (LSL) inspection and replacement program. It also uses quasi-experimental and experimental methods to evaluate the causal impacts of two grant programs that subsidized homeowner replacement costs on LSL program participation. LSLs were more prevalent in areas with a higher concentration of older housing stock, Black and Hispanic residents, renters, and lower property values. Owner-occupied and higher valued properties were more likely to participate in the LSL program. Results from the two grant program evaluations suggest that subsidies for low-income homeowners to cover LSL replacement costs can significantly boost participation, but only when the programs are well publicized and easy to access. Even then, there was still significant non-participation among properties with confirmed LSLs.
Journal Article
Two Generalizations of a Deposit-Refund System
A direct tax is not easy to impose on dumping or litter, so a useful alternative is the deposit-refund system. Two important generalizations of the deposit-refund idea are suggested. In the first generalization, the idea is applied not just to solid waste materials, but to any waste from production or consumption, including waste that may be solid, gaseous or liquid. In the second generalization, the case is considered where government must use distorting taxes on labor and capital incomes. To help meet the revenue requirement, at issue is whether the optimal deposit would be raised and the refund reduced. The second-best-revenue-raising deposit-refund system or two-part instrument to answer that question is derived.
Journal Article
How do data centers make energy efficiency investment decisions? Qualitative evidence from focus groups and interviews
The data center industry is one of the fastest growing energy users in the USA. While the industry has improved its energy efficiency over the past decade, engineering analyses suggest that ample opportunities remain to reduce energy use that would save firms money. This study explores whether and why data centers might limit investment in energy efficiency. Given the scarcity of empirical data in this context, we conducted focus groups and interviews with data center managers to elicit information about factors affecting their investments and used content analysis to qualitatively evaluate the results. Split incentives between departments within companies and between colocation data centers and their tenants, imperfect information about the performance of new technologies, and tradeoffs with data center reliability were the most pervasive factors discussed by participants. While we find some evidence that market failure explanations such as split incentives and imperfect information had a limited role in slowing adoption for participants, rival explanations such as the cost of acquiring context-specific information, and opportunity costs associated with alternate uses of funds or highly valued attributes played a larger role in slowing investment in energy efficiency.
Journal Article
Retrospective evaluation of costs associated with methyl bromide critical use exemptions for open field strawberries in California
Methyl bromide (MBr) has been widely used as a fumigant to control pests in the agricultural sector, but it is also an ozone depleting substance. After 2005, methyl bromide could only be produced when a critical use exemption was agreed to by the signatories to the Montreal Protocol. This paper examines how the EPA’s
cost analyses for open field fresh strawberries in California for the 2006–2010 seasons compare to an
assessment of costs. A key input into the
cost analysis is the assumed yield loss associated with methyl bromide alternatives. The EPA used conservative assumptions given the wide range of estimates in the literature at the time, but it appears that a number of viable MBr alternatives – either new fumigants or new ways of applying existing fumigants – may have become available more quickly and resulted in lower yield loss than initially anticipated. Likewise, it appears that farmers who substituted away from methyl bromide did so without imposing large negative impacts on production in prime California strawberry growing areas.
evaluation also confirms the effect of California regulatory restrictions in limiting the use of various economically competitive alternatives. It is worth noting that unanticipated complications after switching away from methyl bromide, such as new diseases, slowed the transition to MBr alternatives.
Journal Article
Exploring the General Equilibrium Costs of Sector-Specific Environmental Regulations
The requisite scope of analysis to adequately estimate the social cost of environmental regulations has been subject to much discussion. The literature has demonstrated that engineering or partial equilibrium cost estimates likely underestimate the social cost of large-scale environmental regulations and environmental taxes. However, the conditions under which general equilibrium (GE) analysis adds value to welfare analysis for single-sector technology or performance standards, the predominant policy intervention in practice, remains an open question. Using a numerical computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, we investigate the GE effects of regulations across different sectors, abatement technologies, and regulatory designs. Our results show that even for small regulations GE effects are significant, and engineering estimates of compliance costs can substantially underestimate the social cost of single-sector environmental regulations. We find that the downward bias from using engineering costs to approximate social costs depends on the input composition of abatement technologies and the regulated sector.
Journal Article
The Effect of Environmental Regulation on Power Sector Employment: Phase I of the Title IV SO2 Trading Program
We use panel data on fossil fuel fired power plants to examine the impact of Phase I of the Title IV SO2 trading program on electric utility employment. We find little evidence that power plants had significant decreases in employment during Phase I relative to non–Phase I power plants. This finding holds whether we assume a plant- or utility-level decision model of compliance. When we disaggregate by year, we find that employment is significantly lower only in Phase I plants relative to non–Phase I plants in the first year of compliance but not in subsequent years. However, even this effect is not statistically significant at the utility level. Furthermore, we find little evidence of a significant employment effect for subsets of plants or utilities that pursue particular compliance strategies. Controlling for an NOx rate-based standard that partially overlaps with the SO2 trading program does not change our findings.
Journal Article
Exploring the General Equilibrium Costs of Sector-Specific Environmental Regulations1
The requisite scope of analysis to adequately estimate the social cost of environmental regulations has been subject to much discussion. The literature has demonstrated that engineering or partial equilibrium cost estimates likely underestimate the social cost of large-scale environmental regulations and environmental taxes. However, the conditions under which general equilibrium (GE) analysis adds value to welfare analysis for single-sector technology or performance standards, the predominant policy intervention in practice, remains an open question. Using a numerical computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, we investigate the GE effects of regulations across different sectors, abatement technologies, and regulatory designs. Our results show that even for small regulations GE effects are significant, and engineering estimates of compliance costs can substantially underestimate the social cost of single-sector environmental regulations. We find the downward bias from using engineering costs to approximate social costs depends on the input composition of abatement technologies and the regulated sector.
Journal Article