{"title":"Does Energy Star Certification Reduce Energy Use in Commercial Buildings?","authors":"Becka Brolinson, K. Palmer, M. Walls","doi":"10.1086/720952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720952","url":null,"abstract":"A number of policies and programs are aimed at reducing energy use in buildings—building energy codes, disclosure laws, energy-use benchmarking, and mandated or subsidized energy audits. In the United States, many of these initiatives are enacted at the state or local level. At the federal level, one of the main programs is Energy Star certification, which provides a label to top energy-performing buildings. In this paper, we evaluate changes in rents and utility expenditures following Energy Star certification using a national sample of over 4,100 office buildings combined with Energy Star data from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We find that building rents increase by 3.6% following certification, but that utility expenditures remain unchanged. We provide novel evidence that buildings do not make upgrades or capital investments to obtain a certification, suggesting that the Energy Star program primarily certifies buildings that are already energy efficient.","PeriodicalId":47114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2022-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41881482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Environmental Regulation and Product Attributes: The Case of European Passenger Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards","authors":"Yujie Lin, Joshua Linn","doi":"10.1086/720903","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720903","url":null,"abstract":"Energy efficiency and carbon dioxide emissions standards apply to many consumer durables, such as refrigerators and passenger vehicles. Welfare analysis of these standards is complicated by the fact that product manufacturers choose a wide range of product attributes, many of which are unobserved by the researcher. Whereas the literature has considered the effects of standards on product prices, energy efficiency, and perhaps one or two other attributes, we show that in a differentiated product market, standards can affect virtually any product attribute, and those effects have ambiguous implications for consumer welfare. This paper implements a novel strategy to estimate the causal welfare effects of standards on product attributes. Considering European carbon dioxide emissions standards for passenger vehicles, we find that these standards have reduced fuel consumption and emissions. However, the standards have unintentionally reduced vehicle quality, which undermines 26% of the welfare gains of the standards.","PeriodicalId":47114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2022-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49566882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
D. Burtraw, Charles A. Holt, K. Palmer, William M. Shobe
{"title":"Price-Responsive Allowance Supply in Emissions Markets","authors":"D. Burtraw, Charles A. Holt, K. Palmer, William M. Shobe","doi":"10.1086/720690","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720690","url":null,"abstract":"Environmental policy with uncertainty is often posed as a choice between price and quantity instruments. Adding flexibility to fixed policy instruments can improve outcomes. Roberts and Spence noted the efficiency advantages of matching emissions allowances supply to the marginal damage schedule. We propose an implementable approach to making that match, an approach we call “price-responsive supply,” which treats prices and quantities as simultaneously determined in the allowance auction. For competitive environments, price-responsive supply outperforms fixed-price and fixed-quantity instruments. Price-responsive supply can enhance the performance of real-world regulatory environments through an automatic adjustment mechanism that responds instantaneously to new information about abatement costs. We demonstrate the improved performance of price-responsive supply in experiments and simulations. A price-responsive supply schedule, while offering efficiency advantages, also translates the cost-lowering effects of other, coincident policies into accelerated reductions under an emissions cap, thereby helping to resolve the waterbed effect.","PeriodicalId":47114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2022-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60726772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Welfare Implications of Carbon Price Certainty","authors":"Joseph E. Aldy, Sarah Armitage","doi":"10.1086/720768","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720768","url":null,"abstract":"Experiences in real-world pollution markets suggest that firms make persistent errors in forecasting allowance and credit prices that inform their investment decisions. The residual uncertainty characterizing allowance and credit trading means that pollution markets may fail to deliver cost-effective abatement. This contrasts with price-based policies under which firms make investments that equate marginal abatement cost to an emission tax. We incorporate the additional cost of forecast errors under quantity-based programs into a standard Weitzman-style prices versus quantities framework. We distinguish between individual firms’ uncertainty over competitors’ private information and systemic uncertainty over future cost shocks. We show that a welfare-maximizing regulator would favor price instruments in response to the prospect of firm-specific forecast errors under quantity instruments, ceteris paribus, and the relative benefit of price instruments increases with forecast error variance. We discuss the role of policy design, such as incorporating price collars, in mitigating cost inefficiencies from price forecast errors.","PeriodicalId":47114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46689406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
E. Ansink, M. Koetse, J. Bouma, D. Hauck, D. van Soest
{"title":"Crowdfunding Conservation (and Other Public Goods)","authors":"E. Ansink, M. Koetse, J. Bouma, D. Hauck, D. van Soest","doi":"10.1086/718280","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718280","url":null,"abstract":"Crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular means to fund the provision of public goods and especially of nature conservation projects. We implement a lab-in-the-field experiment by setting up a web-based user interface, very similar to actual crowdfunding platforms, to test whether coordination mechanisms, like seed money and decoy projects, can increase the effectiveness of crowdfunding campaigns if multiple public goods projects are eligible for funding. We find some of our treatments to affect coordination especially via early contributions, but not always in an intuitive way. Our results are confirmed in a follow-up experiment with actual nature conservation projects.","PeriodicalId":47114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49209266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making the Best of the Second-Best: Welfare Consequences of Time-Varying Electricity Prices","authors":"Joshua A. Blonz","doi":"10.1086/720566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720566","url":null,"abstract":"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. This paper investigates the response of infrequently studied small commercial and industrial establishments to a four-hour increase in retail electricity prices invoked by individual utilities during peak demand periods 15 times per year. This policy intends to reduce electricity consumption when generation costs are highest. I find that the approximately tripled prices reduce establishment peak electricity usage by 13.5%. Using a model of capacity investment decisions, I find that the program delivers 44% of the benefits of the first-best policy of continuously varying prices and suggest two simple improvements in program design that could nearly double these welfare gains.","PeriodicalId":47114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47092852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ecosystem Services and Land Rental Markets: Producer Costs of Bat Population Crashes","authors":"D. Manning, Amy W. Ando","doi":"10.1086/720303","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720303","url":null,"abstract":"Nonmarket natural capital provides crucial inputs across the economy. We use land rental market data to calculate the welfare impacts of a change in an unpriced natural capital while accounting for spatial spillovers. We apply the welfare analysis to examine the cost of white-nose syndrome (WNS) in bats, which provide pest control services to agricultural producers. WNS, a disease that decimates bat populations, arrived in the United States in the mid-2000s. Leveraging the exogenous change in bat populations, we find that the loss of bats in a county causes land rental rates to fall by $2.84 per acre plus $1.50 per acre per neighboring county with WNS. Agricultural land falls by 1,102 acres plus 582 acres per neighboring county with WNS. As of 2017, agricultural losses from WNS were between $426 and $495 million per year. These estimates of ecosystem service values can inform public management of society’s natural capital.","PeriodicalId":47114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46833164","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
F. Diekert, Tillmann Eymess, J. Luomba, Israel Waichman
{"title":"The Creation of Social Norms under Weak Institutions","authors":"F. Diekert, Tillmann Eymess, J. Luomba, Israel Waichman","doi":"10.1086/720287","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720287","url":null,"abstract":"Formal regulations often fail to ensure sustainable management of natural resources. An alternative approach could rely on the interaction of norm-based interventions and social sanctions. Our lab-in-the-field experiment with fishermen at Lake Victoria studies how a norm-based intervention, namely, social information about high or low levels of previous cooperation, affects behavior and beliefs in a prisoner’s dilemma game with or without weak social sanctioning. Providing different social information succeeds in creating different norms of cooperation, but only if sanctioning is possible: cooperation rates start at a high level and stay at a high level when social information emphasizes cooperation but start at a low level and stay at a low level when social information emphasizes defection. Without social sanctioning, cooperation rates decline, irrespective of the social information. Particularly participants with close connection to others in their experimental session conform to the behavior that is emphasized by the social information message under sanctioning.","PeriodicalId":47114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48238840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Noah’s Ark in a Warming World: Climate Change, Biodiversity Loss, and Public Adaptation Costs in the United States","authors":"F. Moore, A. Stokes, M. Conte, Xiaoliang Dong","doi":"10.1086/716662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/716662","url":null,"abstract":"Climate change poses a growing threat to biodiversity, but the welfare consequences of these changes are not well understood. Here we analyze data on the US Endangered Species Act and project increases in species listing and spending due to climate change. We show that higher endangerment is strongly associated with the probability of listing but also find a large bias toward vertebrate species for both listing and spending. Unmitigated warming would cause the listing of an additional 690 species and committed spending of $21 billion by 2100. Several thousand more species would be critically imperiled by climate change but remain unlisted. Finally, we compare ESA spending with estimates of willingness to pay for conservation of 36 listed species. Aggregate WTP is larger than ESA spending for the vast majority of species even using conservative assumptions and typically one to two orders of magnitude larger than direct ESA spending using less restrictive assumptions.","PeriodicalId":47114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2022-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48779125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Are Residential Energy Efficiency Upgrades Effective? An Empirical Analysis in Southern California","authors":"Yating Chuang, M. Delmas, S. Pincetl","doi":"10.1086/718529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718529","url":null,"abstract":"We analyze multiple subsidy programs for residential energy efficiency upgrades from 2010 to 2015 using electricity billing records of more than 11 million households in Southern California. We find that adopting these upgrades reduces overall electricity usage by 4%. However, there are significant differences in savings between upgrades. Pool pump and refrigeration upgrades generate the largest savings (13% and 6%, respectively). Lighting and HVAC retrofits generate the smallest savings (less than 1%). Some upgrades lead to concerns of rebound effects, such as dishwasher and clothes washer upgrades, and building envelope upgrades. Program impact varies by time of the year and building type. Furthermore, we find that energy savings are inconsistent with the engineering estimates. These results indicate that policy makers should consider the allocation of program funding not simply based on engineering projections but also based on measured electricity consumption such as those described in this study.","PeriodicalId":47114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2022-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44832001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}