Hauvuy, Erwan <br/><br/>
The Cost of Air Pollution Abatement for French Firms 

 -  2005.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> We estimate a technology of air pollution abatement, defined as a relation between conventional production, emissions and inputs specifically allocated to environmental protection. We use original firm-level data on both air emissions and investments in abatement equipment and “clean” processes. Carrying out estimations on an unbalanced panel of 428 firms over the period 1992-1999, we find that the marginal cost of abatement in the case of sulphur dioxides exceeds the current French tax rate several times over. This suggests that, for this pollutant, the level of emissions is currently determined much more by performance standards than by the tax.