WEAI/AERE 2009 - Individual Paper Abstract
Title: Regulatory Impact: The Rise and Fall of Arsenic (substitute for earlier title: IS0 14001 and the Trade of Economic Bads)
Author(s): Lily Hsueh, Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs, University of Washington, lhsueh@u.washington.edu, (206) 694-2532
Abstract:
What is the status of the first generation of pollutants in light of extensive government regulation since the 1970s? To answer this question, this paper takes stock of one such first generation industrial pollutant, arsenic. As a recognized carcinogen, arsenic is astutely toxic at certain levels and has been shown to increase the risk of lung and bladder cancers and to cause environmental damage. At the same time, while restricted in its use, arsenic has been an important input in the manufacturing of wood products, semiconductors, glass, paints, dyes, and pesticides. Commercial use of arsenic in the U.S. has ebbed and flowed in the past century, reaching peaks in the 1940s and 1990s. In the past decade, however, arsenic consumption has fallen to levels not seen since the 1920s.
I take advantage of an extensive time series to identify the impact of federal regulations on the industrial consumption of arsenic, which trends arsenic releases very well for available data from EPA's Toxics Release Inventory (1998-2008). Thus, arsenic use serves as a proxy for arsenic releases by industrial facilities. I conduct three separate analyses, the first of which is a time series analysis of total arsenic use where I control for all potential determinants of the fall and rise of arsenic use between 1929 and 2007. The second analysis is a panel analysis of arsenic consumption by end users between 1975 and 2004. The third analysis examines the causal effect of the 2001 EPA ruling on a more stringent standard for arsenic in drinking water and the 2004 voluntary ban on the use of chromated copper arsenate by the wood products industry to account for the sharp decline in arsenic use/emissions over the past decade.
Preliminary results show that, on the whole, significant events in the political economy— World War II and the voluntary ban on the use of arsenic in residential construction—have had more impact than government regulation on the ebb and flow of arsenic consumption over the past half century. With this said, selected environmental legislations, such as the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1972 and a related federal action--the 2001 EPA ruling--have accomplished what they set out to do, which is to limit contaminants in drinking water sources.