Regional and aggregate economic consequences of environmental policies

This paper evaluates the aggregate impact of air pollution regulations introduced by the US Environmental Protection Agency in the early 2000s. We first provide regression evidence on the regulations' effects across industries and local labor markets. We then use these results to calibrate a quantitative model allowing for general equilibrium spillovers through trade, migration, industry switching, input-output linkages and emission externalities. Our model implies that regulations lowered emissions by 11.1%, but also destroyed between 228'000 and 267'000 jobs. Ignoring general equilibrium spillovers and naively extrapolating from our regressions overestimates job losses in polluting industries, but underestimates job losses in clean industries.