Download or read book Essays in Regional Economic and Environmental Policy Analysis written by Andrew William Schreiber and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is composed of three essays on regional economic analysis of environmental and natural resource policy. My intent in this collection of essays is to demonstrate how advances in data availability and modeling capabilities can facilitate evidence based economic research of policy at the subnational level in the United States. In the first essay, I assess the costliness of water allocation restrictions for irrigators and the broader regional economy. I base the analysis on a calibrated multi-sectoral, multi-regional computable general equilibrium model, and use the model to evaluate economic mechanisms which could improve water and factor utilization in the production of agricultural goods. To achieve this purpose, I use county level economic data and spatial data on groundwater withdrawals for the Central Sands of Wisconsin. Restrictions produce heterogeneous impacts on employment and welfare across counties, depending both on the level of agricultural activity and the policy instruments used to ration water use. Command and control regulation is expensive relative to market based mechanisms, though overall costs are small. Long run losses in aggregate GDP range up to approximately 0.1%, or $10 million across simulations which achieve reduced water withdrawals comparable to levels observed in 1985. The second essay explores the efficacy of the Clean Air Act in regulating ambient air pollution throughout the United States. Ambient air pollution is tracked through a network of in situ monitors. A state's monitors determine compliance with federal National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). Although the locations are typically treated as exogenous by researchers, we argue that there may be incentives for the local regulator to avoid siting monitors near pollution hotspots. We develop an analytical model to study the local regulator's incentives in this federalist arrangement and employ satellite-derived pollution estimates to characterize pollution at non-monitored locations to test for model predictions. We find that, on average, local regulators in counties beneath the federal pollution standard avoid pollution relative to counties above the threshold. This result is especially pronounced for monitors specifically designated to target areas of high pollution concentrations. The results suggest that monitoring data in attainment counties may systematically understate pollution, and the resulting regulatory targeting may be less efficient than previously believed. The final chapter illustrates an open source build routine called blueNOTE (National Open source Tools for general Equilibrium analysis) for producing sub-national economic accounts used in economic equilibrium models in the United States. In this chapter, we describe the build routine and a canonical calibrated static multi-regional, multi-sectoral computable general equilibrium (CGE) model which complements the constructed set of data. We focus on the development of state level economic data and show how to extend the core build stream to incorporate additional energy satellite data for formulating an energy based CGE model. The energy based CGE model is used to calculate carbon leakage rates given different regional configurations of state level action in restricting emission levels. In this calculation, we explore result sensitivity from including gravity based state level bilateral trade flows relative to a model calibrated with a pooled national market.