DEA window analysis for environmental assessment in a dynamic time shift: Performance assessment of U.S. coal-fired power plants

This study discusses a new use of window analysis for DEA environmental assessment in a time horizon where DEA stands for Data Envelopment Analysis. The data sets on environmental protection are often structured by time series. In applying DEA to environmental assessment, it is necessary for us to examine a frontier shift between different periods because it indicates a technology progress on desirable and undesirable outputs. An important feature of the proposed approach is that it incorporates the concept of natural and managerial disposability into the computational framework of DEA and extends the two disposability concepts in a time horizon. To capture the frontier shift, this study proposes a new type of DEA window analysis for environmental assessment. This study applies the proposed DEA window analysis to a data set on U.S. coal-fired power plants during 1995–2007. The application finds that the coal-fired power plants have gradually paid attention to environmental protections under Clean Air Act (CAA). Consequently, their performance under managerial disposability has increased from 1996 to 2007. This indicates the importance of CAA and regulation on industrial pollutions. Thus, it is necessary for the United States to extend the scope of CAA for controlling the amount of CO2 emission because current regulation has a limited policy influence on the source of global warming and climate change in our modern society.