TY  - JOUR
AU  - Fowlie,Meredith
AU  - Knittel,Christopher R.
AU  - Wolfram,Catherine
TI  - Sacred Cars? Optimal Regulation of Stationary and Non-stationary Pollution Sources
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14504
PY  - 2008
Y2  - November 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14504
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14504.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Meredith Fowlie
Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics
University of California, Berkeley
301 Giannini Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-3310
Tel: 510/642-4820
Fax: 510/643-8911
E-Mail: fowlie@berkeley.edu

Christopher R. Knittel
MIT Sloan School of Management
100 Main Street, E62-513
Cambridge, MA 02142
E-Mail: knittel@mit.edu

Catherine Wolfram
Haas School of Business
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA  94720-1900
Tel: 510/642-2588
Fax: 510/643-1420
E-Mail: wolfram@haas.berkeley.edu
AB  - For political and practical reasons, environmental regulations sometimes treat point source polluters, such as power plants, differently from mobile source polluters, such as vehicles. This paper measures the extent of this regulatory asymmetry in the case of nitrogen oxides (NOx), the criteria air pollutant that has proven to be the most recalcitrant in the United States. We find significant differences in marginal abatement costs across source types with the marginal cost of reducing NOx from cars less than half of the marginal cost of reducing NOx from power plants. Our findings have important implications for the efficiency of NOx emissions reductions and, more broadly, the benefits from increasing the sectoral scope of environmental regulation. We estimate that the costs of achieving the desired emissions reductions could have been reduced by nearly $2 billion, or 9 percent of program costs, had marginal abatement costs been equated across source types.
ER  -