Jobs and Environmental Regulation

No 26093, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Political debates around environmental regulation often center around the effect of policy on jobs. Opponents decry the “job-killing” EPA and proponents point to “green jobs” as a positive policy outcome. And beyond the political debates, Congress requires the EPA to evaluate “potential losses or shifts of employment” that regulations under the Clean Air Act may cause. Yet there is a sharp disconnect between the political importance of the jobs question and the limited research on job effects of policy and general skepticism in the academic literature about the importance of those job effects for the costs and benefits of environmental regulation. In this paper, we discuss how the existing research on jobs and environmental regulations often falls short in evaluating these questions and consider recent new work that has attempted to address these problems. We provide an intuitive discussion of key questions for how job effects should enter into economic analysis of regulations. And, using an economic model from Hafstead, Williams, and Chen (2018), we evaluate a range of environmental regulations in both the short and long-run to develop a set of key stylized facts related to jobs and environmental regulations and to identify the key questions that current models can’t yet answer well.

JEL-codes: E24 H23 J64 Q52 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-lab and nep-mac
Note: EEE LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Jobs and Environmental Regulation , Marc A. C. Hafstead, Roberton C. Williams III. in Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy, volume 1 , Kotchen, Stock, and Wolfram. 2020

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Journal Article: Jobs and Environmental Regulation (2020)
Chapter: Jobs and Environmental Regulation (2019)
Working Paper: Jobs and Environmental Regulation (2019)
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