The Economic Roots of Environmental Decline: Property Rights or Path Dependence?

Goodstein, Eban

doi:10.1080/00213624.1995.11505738

Cited by 30 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…We study the environmental implications of this local protectionism for local air quality and overall CO2 emissions. By quantifying the social costs associated with protection of a declining industry, this piece of our empirics is the mirror opposite of other research that attempts to measure the social benefits of protecting infant industries (see Goodstein 1995). This literature argues that society ostensibly props up infant industries because they convey a social good (Melitz 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prolonging Coal’s Sunset: The Causes and Consequences of Local Protectionism for a Declining Polluting Industry

Eyer

Kahn

2017

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In recent years, the share of U.S electricity generated by coal has fallen from nearly 50% to 33%. The costs of this transition are spatially concentrated, and mining states have already lost income due to the reduced demand for coal. Coal states have enacted policies to encourage local power plants to purchase from within state mines. We document that power plants in states and counties with substantial mining activity are more likely to be coal fired and to purchase more within political boundary coal. These results are robust to including flexible controls for the distance from power plants to mines. While coal states benefits from local protectionism, these efforts impose social costs because coal mining and coal burning creates significant environmental consequences. We quantify these effects and find that a one-percentage point increase in the proportion of coal plants in a NERC region with an in-state coal mine results in approximately 2.3 million additional annual tons of CO2 emissions.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prolonging Coal’s Sunset: The Causes and Consequences of Local Protectionism for a Declining Polluting Industry

Eyer

Kahn

2017

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“…The essence of the “pollution effect” of excess capacity is the dependence on the traditional way (Goodstein, 1995; Sydow, 2005), and those factors that may reinforce such dependence and thus discourage the firm's transformation towards a new and clean path can be summarised as transformation barriers. In this paper, we mainly highlight two types of transformation barriers: one stems from the firm itself, named innovation cost, and the other is related to the institutional environment, manifested in the possible “regulatory capture” among local regulatory officials.…”

Section: Theoretical Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Does excess capacity strengthen firms' dependence on the polluting path? Evidence from Chinese iron and steel firms

Ma,

Shen,

Zou

2024

Econ of Transit and Inst Chang

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This paper studies the relationship between firms' excess capacity and their environmental behaviour by matching the environmental data of China's major iron and steel firms with the Chinese Industrial Enterprises database. The findings are as follows. (1) A firm's excess capacity leads to myopic decisions, and firms will pay more attention to short‐run economic benefits at the cost of long‐run environmental benefits, which strengthens their dependence on the polluting path. (2) The dependence is positively correlated with the transformation barriers, and either a higher innovation cost or a higher possibility of regulatory capture in local official governance would lead to greater dependence on the pollution path. (3) Mergers & acquisitions (M&As) may hopefully cut such dependency, but only cross‐provincial M&As led by central state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) can effectively alleviate the “pollution effect” of excess capacity, while intra‐provincial M&As led by local SOEs fail to achieve such a goal.

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“…Or we can believe that we have enough time to make changes later, if we find out that climate change is not benign. Consider the path dependence of technological change (Goodstein, 1995). It took 10 to 20 years for infant industries in solar and wind energy to emerge, and as long for institutions to learn how to develop policies which nurture them cost-effectively, rather than wastefully (Hall, 1996a).…”

Section: Figure 10mentioning

confidence: 99%

Impacts of Global Warming on Agriculture

Hall¹

2018

Food Security, Diversification and Resource Management: Refocusing the Role of Agriculture?

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The Economic Roots of Environmental Decline: Property Rights or Path Dependence?

Cited by 30 publications

References 13 publications

Prolonging Coal’s Sunset: The Causes and Consequences of Local Protectionism for a Declining Polluting Industry

Prolonging Coal’s Sunset: The Causes and Consequences of Local Protectionism for a Declining Polluting Industry

Does excess capacity strengthen firms' dependence on the polluting path? Evidence from Chinese iron and steel firms

Impacts of Global Warming on Agriculture

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