Advisor
Wesley Hartmann

 


Email: bollinger@stanford.edu

• Bollinger, Bryan, “Green Technology Adoption: An Empirical Study of the Southern California Dry Cleaning Industry," Work in Progress.

  Abstract: New technologies are crucial to dealing with the problem of air pollution, which is an increasingly important issue considering its health and environmental consequences. When cleaner technologies exist, the technology diffusion literature has demonstrated that adoption of new technologies can be slow, even if the technology is superior to the status quo. The standard technology used in dry cleaning requires the use of perchoroethylene (perc), a toxic air and ground contaminant. There are alternative, environmentally friendly technologies available, but these have seen only limited adoption to date. There are a variety of potential explanations: i) firms do not realize the full societal benefits of using the green technology and the green technology is not superior in terms of the firm's private incentives; ii) dry cleaners may have long replacement cycles which have slowed the migration to a socially and privately better technology; or iii) firms may not have sufficient information to evaluate whether or not a switch to a green technology is in their private interests. To evaluate these potential explanations, this paper estimates a dynamic durable good replacement model for dry cleaning firms in southern California. The model specifically decomposes the fixed costs and variable profit incentives of adoption, measures replacement cycles, and estimates the effect that green technology demonstration centers have on adoption decisions. An added benefit of this structural approach is that we can perform counterfactual analyses, such as measuring the effect of another state's regulatory regime on the adoption decisions of southern California cleaners. While the model is tailored to the dry cleaning industry, it can be adapted to other applications where regulatory involvement is necessary to facilitate the diffusion of a greener, or generally better, technology.   

• Bollinger, Bryan, Phillip Leslie and Alan Sorensen “Calorie Posting in Chain Restaurants”

• Bollinger, Bryan “The Dependence of Grocery Store Location Decisions on Market Growth”

        Email: bollinger@stanford.edu

        Office: South Building 452
       

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