Three Essays in Environmental Economics

This dissertation consists of three essays in environmental economics. The first essay examines the effectiveness of air quality information designed to reduce the public health risks associated with air pollution exposure. Using daily bike-share trip data for the metro DC area, I estimate the causal effect of air quality alerts on avoidance behavior in a regression discontinuity analysis, assigning a cutoff for treatment that triggers air quality alerts. Air quality alerts cause less bike-share trip counts and duration. Results for heterogeneous treatment effects indicate that air quality alerts mainly reduce weekend trips in the central DC, which implies that bike share-reducing effects are driven by leisure trips rather than commuting trips. The second essay investigates whether a gasoline tax can be a useful policy tool to reduce air pollutants emitted from automobiles. Using a difference-in-differences and synthetic control method, I explore variation differences in air quality across New Jersey and the other states, before and after New Jersey’s gasoline tax increase in 2016. Althoughestimates suggest that New Jersey’s air pollution levels were lower than those of the other states with the gasoline tax increase, none of these differences are statistically significant. Moreover, the gasoline tax increase was not successful in reducing gasoline consumption and vehicle miles traveled. The third essay examines how the effect of temperature on crime varies across urban and rural areas. Using a 10-year panel of monthly crime and temperature data for California cities, I identify the impact of higher temperatures on violent and property crimes in urban and rural areas. Results show that higher temperatures are correlated with more violent crimes. Urban areas have a higher number of violent crimes than rural areas, holding temperature constant. The number of violent crimes tends to increase in proportion to temperature across both areas, but the marginal effects of temperature are smaller in urban than in rural areas.