About

Joseph S. Shapiro is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His research primarily focuses on environmental economics, with a particular emphasis on the causes and consequences of environmental policies in the United States. He investigates topics such as safe drinking water, air pollution regulation, water pollution regulation, and the effects of environmental markets and trade policy on pollution and environmental justice. Shapiro's work often employs empirical methods and machine learning techniques to analyze environmental regulations and their impacts on public health, economic outcomes, and environmental quality. His research has been published in leading journals including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Science, and the Journal of Political Economy. Through his extensive body of work, Shapiro contributes to understanding the effectiveness and efficiency of environmental policies, the role of institutions in shaping environmental outcomes, and the intersection of globalization and environmental regulation.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Natural resource economics
• Microeconomics
• Public economics
• Market economy
• Economics
• Environmental economics
• Business
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Understanding Support for Inefficient Environmental Policy Instruments

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Is Air Pollution Regulation Too Lenient? Evidence from US Offset Markets

  American Economic Review · 2025-08-28 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We develop a framework to estimate the marginal cost of air pollution regulation and apply it to assess policy efficiency. We exploit a provision of the Clean Air Act that requires new plants to pay incumbent facilities to reduce emissions. This “offset” policy creates hundreds of local pollution markets, differing by pollutant and location. Theory and transaction data suggest that offset prices reveal marginal abatement costs. We compare these prices to marginal benefits of pollution reduction estimated using leading air quality models and find that, on average, marginal benefits exceed marginal costs by more than a factor of ten. (JEL D61, H23, K32, Q52, Q53, Q58)

  PublisherDOI

• Institutions, Comparative Advantage, and the Environment

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2025-02-25 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This paper proposes that strong institutions provide comparative advantage in clean industries, and thereby improve a country’s environmental quality. I study financial, judicial, and labour market institutions. Five complementary tests evaluate and assess implications of this hypothesis. First, industries that depend on institutions are clean. Second, strong institutions increase relative exports in clean industries. Third, an industry’s complexity helps explain the link between institutions and clean goods. Fourth, cross-country differences in the composition of output between clean and dirty industries explain an important share of the global distribution of emissions. Fifth, a quantitative general equilibrium model indicates that strengthening a country’s institutions decreases its pollution through relocating dirty industries abroad, though increases pollution in other countries. The comparative advantage that strong institutions provide in clean industries gives one under-explored reason why developing countries have relatively high pollution levels.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Do Earmarks Target Low-Income and Minority Communities? Evidence from US Drinking Water

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2024-05-01

  articleOpen access

  The quality and inequality of US drinking water investments have gained attention after recent environmental disasters in Flint, Michigan, and elsewhere. We compare the formula-based targeting of subsidized loans provided under the Safe Drinking Water Act with the targeting of congressional drinking water earmarks ("pork barrel" spending). Earmarks are often critiqued for potentially privileging wealthier and more politically connected communities. We find that earmarks target Black, Hispanic, and low-income communities, partly due to targeting water systems serving large populations. Earmark and loan targeting differ significantly across all the demographics we analyze. Compared to Safe Drinking Water Act loans, earmarks disproportionately target Hispanic communities but not Black or low-income communities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Effects of “Buy American”: Electric Vehicles and the Inflation Reduction Act

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Machine learning predicts which rivers, streams, and wetlands the Clean Water Act regulates

  Science · 2024-01-25 · 32 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  We assess which waters the Clean Water Act protects and how Supreme Court and White House rules change this regulation. We train a deep learning model using aerial imagery and geophysical data to predict 150,000 jurisdictional determinations from the Army Corps of Engineers, each deciding regulation for one water resource. Under a 2006 Supreme Court ruling, the Clean Water Act protects two-thirds of US streams and more than half of wetlands; under a 2020 White House rule, it protects less than half of streams and a fourth of wetlands, implying deregulation of 690,000 stream miles, 35 million wetland acres, and 30% of waters around drinking-water sources. Our framework can support permitting, policy design, and use of machine learning in regulatory implementation problems.

  PublisherDOI

• The Effects of “Buy American”: Electric Vehicles and the Inflation Reduction Act

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-10-01 · 10 citations

  reportOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Do Earmarks Target Low-Income and Minority Communities? Evidence from US Drinking Water

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-01-01

  reportOpen access

  The quality and inequality of US drinking water investments have gained attention after recent environmental disasters in Flint, Michigan, and elsewhere.We compare the formula-based targeting of subsidized loans provided under the Safe Drinking Water Act with the targeting of congressional drinking water earmarks ("pork barrel" spending).Earmarks are often critiqued for potentially privileging wealthier and more politically connected communities.We find that earmarks target Black, Hispanic, and low-income communities, partly due to targeting water systems serving large populations.Earmark and loan targeting differ significantly across all the demographics we analyze.Compared to Safe Drinking Water Act loans, earmarks disproportionately target Hispanic communities but not Black or low-income communities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Institutions, Comparative Advantage, and the Environment

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-10-01 · 4 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper proposes that strong financial, judicial, and labor market institutions provide comparative advantage in clean industries, and thereby improve a country’s environmental quality. Five complementary tests support this hypothesis. First, industries that depend on institutions are disproportionately clean. Second, strong institutions increase relative exports in clean industries, even conditional on environmental regulation and factor endowments. Third, an industry’s complexity helps explain the link between institutions and clean goods. Fourth, a quantitative general equilibrium model indicates that strengthening a country’s institutions decreases its pollution through relocating dirty industries abroad, though increases pollution in other countries. Fifth, cross-country differences in the composition of output between clean and dirty industries explain more of the global distribution of emissions than differences in the techniques used for production do. The comparative advantage that strong institutions provide in clean industries gives one under-explored reason why developing countries have relatively high pollution levels.

  PublisherDOI

• Regulating Untaxable Externalities: Are Vehicle Air Pollution Standards Effective and Efficient?

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2023 · 38 citations

  • Political Science
  • Environmental economics
  • Natural resource economics

  Abstract The world has 1.4 billion passenger vehicles. How should governments regulate their air pollution emissions? A Pigouvian tax is technologically infeasible. Most countries instead rely on exhaust standards that limit air pollution emissions per mile for new vehicles. We assess the effectiveness and efficiency of these standards, which are the centerpiece of U.S. Clean Air Act regulation of transportation, and counterfactual policies. We show that the air pollution emissions per mile of new U.S. vehicles has fallen spectacularly, by over 99%, since standards began in 1967. Several research designs with a half century of data suggest that exhaust standards have caused most of this decline. Yet exhaust standards are not cost-effective in part because they fail to encourage scrap of older vehicles, which account for the majority of emissions. To study counterfactual policies, we develop an analytical and a quantitative model of the vehicle fleet. Analysis of these models suggests that tighter exhaust standards increase social welfare and increasing registration fees on dirty vehicles yields even larger gains by accelerating scrap, although both reforms have complex effects on inequality.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Leakage from Environmental Regulation: Evidence from Used Vehicle Trade and Smog Check

  NSF · $426k · 2015–2020

• The Environmental Bias of Trade Policy

  NSF · $293k · 2019–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Reed Walker

  116 shared

• Olivier Deschênes

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  42 shared

• Sharat Ganapati

  Georgetown University

  40 shared

• David A. Keiser

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  37 shared

• Michael Greenstone

  University of Chicago

  30 shared

• Alan Barreca

  27 shared

• Karen Clay

  Carnegie Mellon University

  19 shared

• Paul A. David

  Stanford University

  13 shared

Awards & honors

• Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship
• Kiel Institute Excellence in Global Affairs Award
• Marshall Scholarship