Assessing the productivity and abatement effects of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendment
提出一种新方法，同时建模电厂产出与多种污染物的联合生产，利用1990年《清洁空气法修正案》的政策变化，首次评估该政策对燃煤电厂电力生产效率和氮氧化物、二氧化硫减排效率的影响，发现政策引发预期反应，且受规制电厂在生产率上损失更大但污染物减排效果更显著。
How does environmental regulation affect productivity and emissions? Measuring these disparate effects is important for effective eco-policy design, but these channels have been difficult to disentangle. We leverage a new methodology to model the joint production of output and multiple pollutants at the plant level. Exploiting variation from the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendment, our novel and versatile Generalized By-production approach allows us to conduct the first evaluation of the policy that explicitly models efficiencies of output (electricity), as well as efficiencies of NO x and SO 2 reductions for coal-fired power plants. Our analysis highlights not only the production-pollution trade-off plants face, but also complementary effects of pollution abatement across pollutants. We show that the 1990 announcement of the policy induced anticipatory responses despite the regulation not requiring strict compliance until 1995. Plants forced to comply with the policy’s Phase I SO 2 reductions (i.e. assigned nonattainment designation), on average, suffered greater efficiency losses in productivity and showed larger improvements in both pollutant reductions, relative to lightly regulated (attainment) plants. Regulation-induced impacts vary by plant vintage, state environmental quality, and eco-friendly behaviors. Crucially, improvements in pollutant reductions outweigh the countervailing contractions in electricity generation. • Introduce a new methodology to model the joint production of output and multiple pollutants. • Versatile approach highlights disadvantages of using standard TFP to assess eco-policy impacts. • Find production-pollution trade-offs and positive spillover effects of abatement technologies. • Eco-policy impacts vary by plant vintage, state environmental quality, and eco-friendliness. • Researchers and practitioners can use our approach in any contexts involving production and waste.