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The Costs of Environmental Regulation in a Concentrated Industry

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Author Info
Stephen Ryan
Abstract

The typical cost analysis of an environmental regulation consists of an engineering estimate of the compliance costs. In industries where fixed costs are an important determinant of market structure this static analysis ignores the dynamic effects of the regulation on entry, investment, and market power. I evaluate the welfare costs of the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act on the US Portland cement industry, accounting for these effects through a dynamic model of oligopoly in the tradition of Ericson and Pakes (1995). Using a recently developed two-step estimator, I recover the entire cost structure of the industry, including the distribution of sunk entry costs and adjustment costs of investment. I find that the Amendments have significantly increased the sunk cost of entry. I solve for the Markov perfect Nash equilibrium (MPNE) of the model and simulate the welfare effects of the Amendments. A static analysis misses the welfare penalty on consumers, and obtains the wrong sign on the welfare effects on incumbent firms.

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Paper provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research in its series Working Papers with number 0510.

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Date of creation: Jul 2005
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Handle: RePEc:mee:wpaper:0510

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Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Ariel Pakes & Michael Ostrovsky & Steve Berry, 2004. "Simple Estimators for the Parameters of Discrete Dynamic Games (with Entry/Exit Samples)," NBER Working Papers 10506, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  2. Rust, John, 1987. "Optimal Replacement of GMC Bus Engines: An Empirical Model of Harold Zurcher," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 55(5), pages 999-1033, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  3. Pesendorfer, Martin & Schmidt-Dengler, Philipp, 2003. "Identification and Estimation of Dynamic Games," CEPR Discussion Papers 3965, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  4. George Hall & John Rust, 2007. "The (S,s) Policy is an Optimal Trading Strategy in a Class of Commodity Price Speculation Problems," Economic Theory, Springer, vol. 30(3), pages 515-538, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  5. C. Lanier Benkard, 2004. "A Dynamic Analysis of the Market for Wide-Bodied Commercial Aircraft," Review of Economic Studies, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 71, pages 581-611, 07. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  6. Attanasio, Orazio P, 2000. "Consumer Durables and Inertial Behaviour: Estimation and Aggregation of (S, s) Rules for Automobile Purchases," Review of Economic Studies, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 67(4), pages 667-96, October.
  7. Alberto Salvo, 2004. "Inferring Conduct under the Threat of Entry: The Case of the Brazilian Cement Industry," STICERD - Economics of Industry Papers 38, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE. [Downloadable!]
  8. Ericson, Richard & Pakes, Ariel, 1995. "Markov-Perfect Industry Dynamics: A Framework for Empirical Work," Review of Economic Studies, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 62(1), pages 53-82, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  9. James Levinsohn & Amil Petrin, 2003. "Estimating Production Functions Using Inputs to Control for Unobservables," Review of Economic Studies, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 70(2), pages 317-341, 04. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  10. Patrick Bajari & C. Lanier Benkard & Jonathan Levin, 2007. "Estimating Dynamic Models of Imperfect Competition," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 75(5), pages 1331-1370, 09. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  11. David Besanko & Ulrich Doraszelski, 2004. "Capacity Dynamics and Endogenous Asymmetries in Firm Size," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 35(1), pages 23-49, Spring.
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  12. Chernozhukov, Victor & Hong, Han, 2003. "An MCMC approach to classical estimation," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 115(2), pages 293-346, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  13. Olley, G Steven & Pakes, Ariel, 1996. "The Dynamics of Productivity in the Telecommunications Equipment Industry," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 64(6), pages 1263-97, November. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  14. Russell W. Cooper & John C. Haltiwanger, 2000. "On the Nature of Capital Adjustment Costs," NBER Working Papers 7925, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Andrew Sweeting, 2007. "Dynamic Product Repositioning in Differentiated Product Markets: The Case of Format Switching in the Commercial Radio Industry," NBER Working Papers 13522, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  2. Weintraub, Gabriel Y. & Benkard, C. Lanier & Van Roy, Benjamin, 2007. "Computational Methods for Oblivious Equilibrium," Research Papers 1969, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business. [Downloadable!]
  3. Doraszelski, Ulrich & Satterthwaite, Mark, 2007. "Computable Markov-Perfect Industry Dynamics: Existence, Purification, and Multiplicity," CEPR Discussion Papers 6212, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Gabriel Weintraub & C. Lanier Benkard & Ben Van Roy, 2005. "Markov Perfect Industry Dynamics with Many Firms," NBER Working Papers 11900, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  5. Allan Collard-Wexler, 2006. "Plant Turnover and Demand Fluctuations in the Ready-Mix Concrete Industry," Working Papers 06-08, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau. [Downloadable!]
  6. Ulrich Doraszelski & Mark Satterthwaite, 2007. "Computable Markov-Perfect Industry Dynamics: Existence, Purification, and Multiplicity," Levine's Bibliography 321307000000000912, UCLA Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
  7. Weintraub, Gabriel Y. & Benkard, C. Lanier & Van Roy, Benjamin, 2007. "Markov Perfect Industry Dynamics with Many Firms," Research Papers 1919r, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business. [Downloadable!]
  8. Cameron Hepburn & John K.-H. Quah & Robert A. Ritz, 2006. "Emissions Trading and Profit-Neutral Grandfathering," Economics Series Working Papers 295, University of Oxford, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
  9. Gabriel Y. Weintraub & C. Lanier Benkard & Benjamin Van Roy, 2005. "Markov perfect industry dynamics with many firms," Working Paper Series 2005-23, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. [Downloadable!]
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