Carbon-Trading Pilot Programs in China and Local Air Quality

By Douglas Almond and Shuang Zhang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

China emits twice as much CO2 as the United States. Launched in seven regions in 2013–2014, China's pilot carbon-trading programs cover roughly 7 percent of China's CO2 emissions. These market-based policies offer the best existing...

Industrial Energy Regulation: The Role of Business Conglomerates in China

By Qiaoyi Chen, Zhao Chen, Zhikuo Liu, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, and Daniel Yi Xu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This paper characterizes the importance of ownership networks of firms that are subject to a prominent energy regulation in China: the Top 1000 Enterprises Energy-Saving Program. We use data on the activities of regulated and unregulated firms that are pa...

Border Carbon Adjustments When Carbon Intensity Varies across Producers: Evidence from California

By Meredith Fowlie, Claire Petersen, and Mar Reguant

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Governments taxing carbon emissions within their jurisdiction can impose a commensurate tax on emissions embodied in imports in order to mitigate emissions leakage. California offers a rare opportunity to investigate how such a border carbon adjustment (B...

Changing Population Exposure to Pollution in China's Special Economic Zones

By Leslie A. Martin and Katie Zhang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Martin and Zhang (2020) show that the increase in manufacturing output in China's special economic zones significantly increased air pollution. In this complementary paper, we document that widespread migration into these industrial clusters between 2000 ...

Where Is Pollution Moving? Environmental Markets and Environmental Justice

By Joseph S. Shapiro and Reed Walker

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Do US air pollution offset markets disproportionately relocate pollution to or from low-income or minority communities? Concerns about an equal distribution of environmental quality across communities—environmental justice—have growing policy influenc...

Cycles of Fire? Politics and Forest Burning in Indonesia

By Clare Balboni, Robin Burgess, Anton Heil, Jonathan Old, and Benjamin A. Olken

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This paper examines the link between electoral incentives and environmental degradation by exploiting a satellite dataset on 107,000 forest fires and 879 asynchronous district elections in Indonesia. Fires represent a cheap but illegal means of converting...

Indoor Air Quality, Information, and Socioeconomic Status: Evidence from Delhi

By Michael Greenstone, Kenneth Lee, and Harshil Sahai

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

In Delhi, one of the world's most polluted cities, there is relatively little information on indoor air pollution and how it varies by socioeconomic status (SES). Using indoor air quality monitors (IAQMs), we find that winter levels of household air pollu...

Estimating the Elasticity to Real-Time Pricing: Evidence from the Spanish Electricity Market

By Natalia Fabra, David Rapson, Mar Reguant, and Jingyuan Wang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We estimate consumer response to the first large-scale real-time electricity pricing (RTP) program. In 2015, RTP became the default tariff for residential customers in Spain, exposing them to prices that vary hourly based on day-ahead wholesale prices. Us...

Low Energy: Estimating Electric Vehicle Electricity Use

By Fiona Burlig, James Bushnell, David Rapson, and Catherine Wolfram

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We provide the first at-scale estimate of electric vehicle (EV) home charging. Previous estimates are based on conflicting surveys or are extrapolated from a small, unrepresentative sample of households with dedicated EV meters. We combine billions of hou...

Making Clean Firms Cleaner: Targeting Environmental Regulation to Maximize Returns

By Paige Weber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Many environmental regulations are designed to clean up the dirtiest firms. However, if pollution intensity is negatively correlated with market share, this approach may not be the most cost-effective way to reduce pollution. This paper illustrates the th...

Women in Economics: Moving Up or Falling Off the Academic Career Ladder?

By Donna K. Ginther and Shulamit Kahn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

The percentage of economics doctorates awarded to women has increased over the past twenty years. This article considers whether women Ph.D. economists have increased their representation in academia, particularly at higher tenured ranks. Our study draws ...

Machine Learning about Treatment Effect Heterogeneity: The Case of Household Energy Use

By Christopher R. Knittel and Samuel Stolper

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We use causal forests to evaluate the heterogeneous treatment effects (TEs) of repeated behavioral nudges toward household energy conservation. The average response to treatment is a monthly electricity reduction of 9 kilowatt-hours (kWh), but the full di...

Union Reform, Performance Pay, and New Teacher Supply: Evidence from Wisconsin's Act 10

By E. Jason Baron

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This study examines the impact of performance pay on teacher selection. I exploit a shift toward performance pay in Wisconsin induced by the enactment of Act 10, which gave school districts autonomy to redesign their compensation schemes. Following the la...

School Capital Expenditure Rules and Distribution

By Barbara Biasi, Julien Lafortune, and David Schönholzer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We provide descriptive evidence on the level and within-state distribution of school capital expenditures over the past two decades. We relate these to the fiscal institutions governing capital funding across states. Within-state differences in capital ex...

Test-Based Accountability and the Effectiveness of School Finance Reforms

By Christian Buerger, Seung Hyeong Lee, and John D. Singleton

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

A recent literature provides new evidence that school resources are important for student outcomes. This paper examines whether school accountability systems that incentivize performance (such as No Child Left Behind) raise the efficiency with which addit...

The Common Application and Student Choice

By Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We study the effects of the Common Application (CA) platform, which allows students to submit a single application to multiple institutions, on student choice. Using individual-level data from freshman surveys over the period 1982–2014, we develop two p...

Who Gets Their First Job at a Large Firm? The Distinct Roles of Education and Skills

By Jaime Arellano-Bover

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Young workers' early years in the labor market are a key and formative time. Using data from 31 countries, this article documents the selection of labor market entrants into large firms, which existing literature associates with propitious environments fo...

Pure-Chance Jobs versus a Labor Market: The Impact on Careers of a Random Serial Dictatorship for First Job Seekers

By Ashna Arora, Leonard Goff, and Jonas Hjort

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Do workers' first jobs affect their careers? Do such first-job effects (FJEs) vary across worker types? If so, can policy improve upon a "free" labor market by altering initial worker-employer matches? We study these questions using Norway's pre–2013 sy...

Initial Industry and Long-Term Earnings Growth

By Stephen L. Ross and Patralekha Ukil

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We test whether employment growth in a male worker's initial industry influences earnings growth using the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We follow workers for 20 years after reporting their first industry, finding that lower employment growt...

Long-Term Employment Effects from Job Losses during the COVID-19 Crisis? A Comparison to the Great Recession and Its Slow Recovery

By Till von Wachter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This paper compares predictions for the long-term reductions in the employment-to-population (EPOP) ratio based on estimates of the overall job-loss rate and the long-term effects of job loss with the actual evolution of the EPOP ratio. It took about ten ...