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AbstractTransit buses are an integral part of urban life. They reduce externalities generated from private vehicles and increase geographic mobility. However, unlike most private vehicles in the United States, they use diesel fuel and emit higher amounts of toxic pollutants. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set emission standards for transit buses starting in 1988 that have been continually updated, but their public health and economic impacts are unclear due to scarce emissions data. I construct a novel panel dataset for the New York City (NYC) Transit bus fleet between 1990 and 2009 and examine the impact of bus pollution on infant health by using bus vintage as a proxy for emissions. I exploit the variation in vintage as older buses are retired and replaced with newer, lower‐emitting buses forced to adhere to stricter emission standards. I then assign maternal exposure to bus vintage at the census block level. Findings suggest that maternal exposure to the oldest, unregulated buses is associated with modest reductions in birth weight and gestational age relative to newer buses that abide by emissions policies. I then conduct a back‐of‐the‐envelope cost‐benefit calculation and find net economic benefits of $53.3 million resulting from improved emission standards for the 2009 birth cohort in NYC. Since the treatment in this study clearly maps to federal emissions policies, these results are the first to provide credible evidence that transit bus emission standards had a positive effect on infant health.

AbstractThe present study shows that the availability of "pollution havens" can negate the effect of national legislation that tightens industrial greenhouse gas emission standards. In the perverse case, a unilateral tightening of said standards in Country A (a country with relatively stringent industrial emission standards) causes a representative multinational firm to emit more units of greenhouse gas in its global production. The article highlights the potential perils of unilateral action on environmental issues that are global in nature.

This study analyzed six large newspapers' economic coverage of federal regulations intended to reduce motor vehicle emissions under the Clean Air Act. Examination of this topic involved evaluating costs and benefits of government controls. All but one paper explicitly referred to formal cost-benefit analysis as a method to evaluate the standards. They all included specific economic costs and benefits associated with regulating motor vehicle emissions. However, the reporting on costs was far more extensive than on benefits in five of the papers.

Abstract The European Union, with 60% of the total global production of biogas, is the world leader. In 2012, the percentage of electrical energy produced by biogas was 6% of the EU-28 electricity generated through renewable sources while, in 2013, the almost 830 biogas units produced 7448 GWh which corresponds to 14% of EU-28 gross electricity production. Germany, U.K. and Italy are the main EU biogas producers with over 78% of the 2013 primary energy production. Electricity production is the main biogas energy recovery form because the engine cooling water is used to maintain the digester required temperature while energy crops and manure are the most used organic matters. Spark-ignition engines with a rated power of 1MWel in which the filtered biogas is burned to produce work is the widely-adopted technology. With the aim of analyzing the emissions of a real biogas engine, in the present work, the authors firstly present an overview of the Italian biogas sector and the most used conversion technologies. Then, the standards which regulate the biogas plant emissions and the emissions data acquired during a one-year monitoring activity on 10 biogas plants are presented and discussed with the aim of assessing the biogas units' real emissions.

To evaluate a system or platform on its electromagnetic compatibility generally involves the application of several EMC standards. In order to compare applicable standards, one needs a common denominator as a basis. In this study, EMC norms for electromagnetic radiation are assessed statistically. A framework describing stochastic electromagnetic fields is applied and at the hand of the examples of military (MIL) and international electrotechnical commission (IEC) standards further developed for this purpose. The formalism not only evaluates such requirements but also enables the comparison of different standards in a probabilistic way. First illustrative results are presented. Frequency bands are identified for which IEC complying equipment exceeds the MIL standard with high probability.

We consider a two-country model of price competition, with one polluting firm in each country and differentiated products. Assuming away, to simplify, abatement efforts and input substitution, we compare the impact on output, leakages, and trade volumes of a carbon tax versus an emission standard policy, unilaterally enacted by the home country. Under the tax the two firms set their prices simultaneously, in a Bertrand game. Under the standard the home firm's price is conditioned on the price of the foreign firm, so as to abide the emission constraint. As a result, the tax leads to higher leakages and global emissions than the standard. The standard also implies a better trade balance for the home country than the tax.