Project Grant 2417375

This $485,596 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (CFDA 47.075) program funds a research project at the University of California, Berkeley. The project studies the economic and environmental consequences of policies that apply stricter environmental regulation to larger firms, such as the Clean Air Act's "major source" emissions thresholds. The researchers will build an economic model to analyze how this type of environmental regulation affects pollution, regulatory enforcement, firm revenues and costs, and productivity. The model will then be used to evaluate the impacts of alternative environmental policies, such as applying the same rules to both large and small firms. The results of this research are intended to provide insights to inform the development of more efficient environmental regulation.