Working Paper: NBER ID: w30702
Authors: Mark R. Jacobsen; James M. Sallee; Joseph S. Shapiro; Arthur A. Van Benthem
Abstract: The world has 1.4 billion passenger vehicles. How should governments regulate their air pollution emissions? A Pigouvian tax is technologically infeasible. Most countries instead rely on exhaust standards that limit air pollution emissions per mile for new vehicles. We assess the effectiveness and efficiency of these standards, which are the centerpiece of US Clean Air Act regulation of transportation, and counterfactual policies. We show that the air pollution emissions per mile of new US vehicles has fallen spectacularly, by over 99 percent, since standards began in 1967. Several research designs with a half century of data suggest that exhaust standards have caused most of this decline. Yet exhaust standards are not cost-effective in part because they fail to encourage scrap of older vehicles, which account for the majority of emissions. To study counterfactual policies, we develop an analytical and a quantitative model of the vehicle fleet. Analysis of these models suggests that tighter exhaust standards increase social welfare and that increasing registration fees on dirty vehicles yields even larger gains by accelerating scrap, though both reforms have complex effects on inequality.
Keywords: vehicle air pollution; exhaust standards; cost-effectiveness; social welfare; policy reforms
JEL Codes: H21; H23; H7; Q5; Q50; R4
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| increasing registration fees on older vehicles (R48) | enhance social welfare (I30) |
| exhaust standards (R48) | elasticity of vehicle emission rates (R48) |
| exhaust standards (R48) | declines in emissions (F64) |
| exhaust standards (R48) | decline in air pollution emissions per mile of new vehicles (F64) |
| exhaust standards (R48) | temporal alignment with changes in emissions (C22) |