How did air quality standards affect employment at US power plants? The importance of timing, geography, and stringency.

We examine fossil-fuel power plant employment impacts of new nitrogen oxides (NOx) provisions under Title I of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAAs). These provisions required installation of reasonably available control technology (RACT) for NOx emissions for major stationary sources in the Ozone Transport Region and in more stringently classified ozone nonattainment areas. Standard approaches using nonattainment designation to identify regulatory impacts abstract from important implementation aspects such as when regulatory changes occur, where regulations are in effect, and which specific regulations apply. Omitting these factors can introduce bias by contaminating the control group, leading to underestimation of historical employment impacts and overestimation of projected impacts from tightening regulations. Our results indicate that the new NOx RACT requirements negatively impacted power plant employment. We find no significant impacts on generation, suggesting that installation of pollution controls may have contributed to labor-saving technical change at affected units.

Retrospective Evaluation of the Costs of Complying with Light-Duty Vehicle Surface Coating Requirements.

This paper compares the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) ex-ante compliance cost estimates for the 2004 Automobile and Light-Duty Truck Surface Coating National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants to ex-post evidence on the actual costs of compliance based on ex-post cost data gathered from a subset of the industry via pilot survey and follow-up interviews. Unlike many prior retrospective studies on the cost of regulatory compliance, we use this newly-gathered information to identify the key drivers of any differences between the ex-ante and ex-post estimates. We find that the U.S. EPA overestimated the cost of compliance for the plants in our sample and that overestimation was driven primarily by differences in the method of compliance rather than differences in the perunit cost associated with a given compliance approach. In particular, the U.S. EPA expected facilities to install pollution abatement control technologies in their paint shops to reduce emissions of hazardous air pollutants, but instead these plants complied by reformulating coatings.