abstract: Environmental regulations such as carbon taxation and air quality standards can lead to notable improvements in health outcomes and ambient air quality. However, these types of policies may have significant impacts on the labor market, in particular for workers in energy-intensive industries, especially if these workers have acquired specific human capital in those industries. This dissertation focuses on the general equilibrium consequences of environmental regulation on the labor market. Specifically, I examine costly reallocation of workers between sectors, the welfare effects of involuntary unemployment, and the heterogeneous effects of this policy on different types of workers. To this end, I develop a two-sector search model with sectoral human capital accumulation to explore the effects on the labor market of implementing a per unit of energy use carbon tax in the US. I separate the economy into a high-intensive sector (’dirty’) and a low-intensive sector (’clean’). I calibrate the model using 2014 U.S. data. I find that a carbon tax increases total unemployment by 0.06 percentage points, decreases the dirty employment rate by 2.1 percent, and increases the clean employment rate by 1.04 percent. Firms in the dirty sector adjust by decreasing the demand for high-skilled workers and increasing the number of vacancies in the low-skilled market / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Economics 2019
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:asu.edu/item:54872 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Contributors | Fernandez Intriago, Luis Armando (Author), Silverman, Daniel (Advisor), Kuminoff, Nicolai V. (Committee member), Fried, Stephanie (Committee member), Arizona State University (Publisher) |
| Source Sets | Arizona State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral Dissertation |
| Format | 90 pages |
| Rights | http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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