Policy-Induced Technology Adoption: Evidence From The U.S. Lead Phasedown *

By Suzi Kerr, Richard G. Newell. Controlling Automobile Air Pollution, 2001

192 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Theory suggests that economic instruments, such as pollution taxes or tradable permits, can provide more efficient technology adoption incentives than conventional regulatory standards. We explore this issue for an important industry undergoing dramatic decreases in allowed pollution-the U.S. petroleum industry's phasedown of lead in gasoline. Using a duration model applied to a panel of refineries from 1971-1995, we find that the pattern of technology adoption is consistent with an economic response to market incentives, plant characteristics, and alternative policies. Importantly, evidence suggests that the tradable permit system used during the phasedown provided incentives for more efficient technology adoption decisions.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2c763a1feddb1a8f7c5d81b56f5f34b1955dbc8c

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Citations in the corpus

Clean technological change in developing-country industrial clusters: Mexican leather tanning (2010, background): “The link between formal regulatory pressure and clean technological change is well established in the theoretical literature (e.g., Millman and Prince 1989), and a number of researchers have found empirical evidence for it (e.g., Kerr and Newell 2003).”
A bibliometric review of the innovation adoption literature (2018, background): “Scholars have applied integral conceptualizations to study the effect of governmental policies on adoption by focusing on the nexus between technology and environmental policies [179-182] and on the nexus between incentive- and prescriptiveoriented policy instruments [183, 184].”
Innovation and Climate Policy (2010, background): “Examples include Kerr and Newell (2003) on the removal of lead from gasoline in the United States, Kemp (1998) on the effect of effluent charges on biological treatment of wastewater, Snyder et al. (2003) on the diffusion of membrane-cell technology in the chlorine manufacturing industry, and Popp…”
Induced innovation in clean energy technologies from foreign environmental policy stringency? (2019, background): “For example, the impact of U.S. regulation on automobile emissions and the rapid response of foreign car manufacturers is empirically shown in several papers (Pakes et al., 1993; Kerr & Newell, 2003; Aghion et al., 2016).”