The provision of safe drinking water provides a dramatic example of the inherent complexity involved in incorporating environmental justice (EJ) considerations into the implementation and enforcement of new environmental standards. To promote substantive EJ, implementation policy must be concerned with the net risk reduction of new and revised regulations. The regulatory concern is that higher water bills for low-income customers of small public water systems may result in less disposable income for other health-related goods and services. In the net, this trade-off may be welfare decreasing, not increasing. Advocates of Health–Health Analysis have argued that the reduction in health-related spending creates a problem for traditional benefit-cost analysis since the long-run health implications of this reduction are not considered. The results of this investigation tend to support this contention. An evaluation of the internal structure of consumption expenditures reveals that low-expenditure households can be expected to react to an increase in the relative price of housing-related goods and services due to a water-rate hike by reducing both housing and health-related expenditures. That is, the representative low-expenditure household re-establishes equilibrium by not only decreasing housing-related spending, but also by decreasing spending on health-related expenditures in a modest but significant way. These results reflect the fact that expenditures on housing are a major proportion of overall household spending, and that accommodating drinking water surcharges exacerbates both health and food security concerns for low-expenditures households.

<p>This dissertation examines the impact of the expansion of renewable technology at both national and local level, through distinct essays. At the national level, the first paper analyzes the effects of economic and distributional impacts of climate mitigation policy, in the context of a developing country, to understand the interactions between the energy system and the macroeconomic environment. In the case of the local level, the second paper uses synthetic control method, to estimate the effect at the county level of utility scale wind in the development indicators for two counties in the U.S. </p> <p>The first paper assesses the economic and distributional impacts of Nicaragua’s commitments to limit future greenhouse gas emissions in the context of the Paris Agreement, known as the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). The analysis relies on two distinct models. The first is a top-down approach based on a single-country computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, known as the Mitigation, Adaptation and New Technologies Applied General Equilibrium (MANAGE) Model. The second is a bottom-up approach based on the Open-Source energy Modeling System (OSeMOSYS), which is technology rich energy model. The combined model is calibrated to an updated social accounting matrix for Nicaragua, which disaggregates households into 20 representative types: 10 rural and 10 urban households. For the household disaggregation we have used information from the 2014 Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) for Nicaragua. Our analysis focuses on the distributional impacts of meeting the NDCs as well as additional scenarios—in a dynamic framework as the MANAGE model is a (recursive) dynamic model. The results show that a carbon tax has greatest potential for reduction in emissions, with modest impact in macro variables. An expansion of the renewable sources in the electricity matrix also leads to significant reduction in emissions. Only a carbon tax achieves a reduction in emissions consistent with keeping global warming below 2°C. Nicaragua’s NDC alone would not achieve the target and mitigation instruments are needed. An expansion of generation from renewable sources, does not lead to a scenario consistent with a 2°C pathway. </p> <p>The second paper measures the impact of wind generation on county level outcomes through the use of the Synthetic Control Method (SCM). SCM avoids the pitfalls of other methods such as input-output models and project level case studies that do not provide county level estimates. We find that the local per capita income effect of utility wind scale is 6 percent (translate into an increase of $1,511 in per capita income for 2019) for Benton County and 8 percent for White county in Indiana (an increase of $2,100 in per capita income for 2019). The per capita income effect measures the average impact, which includes the gains in rents from capital, land, and labor from wind power in these counties. Moreover, we find that most of the rents from wind power accrue to the owners of capital and labor. Even assuming the lowest projections of electricity prices and the highest reasonable cost we still find a 10 percent minimum rate of return to capital for both Benton and White counties’ wind power generators. Furthermore, we find that there are excess rents that could be taxed and redistributed at the county, state, or federal level without disincentivizing investment in wind power.</p>

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Cette thèse étudie les mécanismes économiques concernant la transition vers des technologies propres et examine les approches politiques pour atteindre le sentier de transition socialement optimale. Elle examine les politiques économiques visant à faire face au changement climatique, telles que l'adaptation et la taxation des ressources non-renouvelables. En outre, elle examine les politiques économiques visant à accroître l'utilisation de technologies efficaces et identifie les cas pour lesquels la politique atteint ses objectifs ou non. Elle analyse également l'impact des inégalités de richesse sur le soutien politique aux taxes environnementales. Le premier chapitre étudie la transition énergétique en utilisant un modèle de croissance optimale dans lequel les ressources non-renouvelables et renouvelables sont des substituts imparfaits. Le deuxième chapitre étudie le rôle de la politique d'adaptation sur la transition vers une économie propre. Il intègre la politique d'adaptation dans le problème de l'extraction optimale des ressources non-renouvelables avec des externalités de pollution, en mettant l'accent sur la politique d'adaptation en étant une variable de stock. Le troisième chapitre se concentre sur le problème de l'adoption des nouvelles technologies dans un cadre micro-économique. Il regarde le comportement des entreprises qui font face à une décision d'investir : soit dans une capacité de production bon marché mais inefficace, soit dans une capacité plus chère mais efficace, lorsqu'on prend en compte la présence d'une contrainte financière. Le quatrième et dernier chapitre examine les effets distributifs d'une taxe sur la pollution en considérant une société dans laquelle la richesse est répartie de manière hétérogène entre les ménages. / This dissertation investigates the economic mechanisms underlying the transition to clean technologies and examines policy approaches to achieve the socially optimal path. It studies various policy measures aiming to deal with climate change, such as adaptation and taxation of non-renewable resources. Furthermore, it examines the policy instruments that target increasing the use of efficient technologies and identifies cases in which the policy reaches its objectives or not. It also analyzes the role of heterogeneity in society on agents' willingness to support a pollution tax. The first chapter studies the energy transition by using an optimal growth model in which non-renewable and renewable natural resources are imperfect substitutes in providing energy services necessary for production. The second chapter studies the role of adaptation policy on the transition to a low­ carbon economy. lt incorporates adaptation policy into the problem of optimal non-renewable resource extraction with pollution externalities, by focusing on the capital nature of adaptation measures. The third chapter focuses on the problem of adopting new technologies in a micro-economic framework. lt studies the behavior of firms when they face a decision to invest either in a cheap but inefficient production capacity or in an expensive but efficient one, by taking into account the presence of a financial constraint. The fourth and last chapter investigates the distributional impacts of a pollution tax by considering a society in which wealth is distributed heterogeneously among households.