Full Title: The Regulatory Red Herring: The Role of Job Impact Analyses in Environmental Policy Debates
Author(s): Michael A. Livermore, Elizabeth Piennar, and Jason A Schwartz
Publisher(s): Institute for Policy Integrity
Publication Date: April 1, 2012
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
Recent policy debates about environmental regulation have focused on how those rules will affect the labor market. Opponents of regulation argue that increasing production costs will lead to layoffs, while proponents of stronger protections counter that new rules can result in businesses hiring new workers to reduce their environmental impact.
To bolster these competing claims, advocates on both sides have promoted economic studies that purport to examine the employment effects of environmental protection. These job impact analyses are extremely sensitive to data and model structure, but in policy discussions the underlying assumptions and limitations of models are inconsistently reported and too often ignored. In an advocacy context, job impact analyses can tell very different stories, often depending on the narrator. In one revealing example, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity estimated that two EPA rules on power plant emissions would trigger a 1.4 million job loss; meanwhile, using a different model and different assumptions, the Political Economy Research Institute predicted the same two rules would generate a 1.4 million job gain.