A well-known study by the economists Eli Berman and Linda T.M. Bui of Boston University looked at the aftermath of new regulations governing air quality in Los Angeles. The South Coast Air Quality Management District in Los Angeles enacted some of the country’s most stringent air quality standards in the 1980s, and Berman and Bui compared Los Angeles firms with those in Louisiana and Texas to see if the more regulated firms cut jobs as a result. They found that the local air quality regulations were not responsible for a large decline in employment, and that the regulations might have actually increased labor demand since firms need to hire people to help them deal with the new regulations. They argued that because all firms in a region were affected by the same regulations, they were still able to compete against one another while facing the same costs. “We find no evidence that local air quality regulation substantially reduced employment,” they concluded.

In another oft-cited study, the economist Richard Morgenstern, a former EPA administrator who is now at the nonprofit Resources of the Future, looked at Census data between 1979 and 1991 to determine whether regulation of some pollution-causing industries destroyed jobs. Morgenstern and the economist Anna Belova of the research firm Abt Associates updated the paper in 2013 with more data. They found that over 30 years in industries including petroleum, plastics, pulp and paper, and iron and steel, there were some net job increases, and no significant job losses as a result of regulation. “A million dollars of additional…[regulation] expenditure is associated with an insignificant change in employment,” Morgenstern writes.

Sometimes, regulations may cause jobs to shift from one area of the country to another. A well-known study by Michael Greenstone looked at the effects of the Clean Air Act, which set a minimum level of air quality that counties were required to meet, and further regulated polluters in areas that did not meet the standards. Greenstone found that the regulations might have led to 40,000 job losses a year in facilities in parts of the country that had “dirty” air. But it’s possible that those losses were offset by job gains in cleaner areas, if factories relocated there, or if new businesses were created there. Still, even if there were jobs created in other states, it’s not easy for people to uproot their families and move to those other jobs, even if they can find them.

Of course, the purpose of environmental regulation is not merely to avoid killing jobs, and there are real society-wide benefits in protecting the environment that must be taken into account as well. Often those gains far outweigh any economic damage the regulations may cause. For example, in a 2013 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Berkeley economist W. Reed Walker followed what happened to workers at firms impacted by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, which required polluting firms to obtain operating permits. He wanted to know whether workers who left newly-regulated companies were able to easily find other jobs (he did not know whether the workers were fired or quit, just that they left). He found that the many workers in the regulated sectors left their firms, and that the average worker saw an earnings loss equivalent to 20 percent of their pre-regulatory earnings. This amounted to $5.4 billion in lost earnings—no small sum. Yet the EPA has calculated that the health benefits of the amendments between 1990 and 2010 are between $160 billion and $1.6 trillion. “In light of these benefits, the earnings losses borne by workers in newly regulated industries are relatively small,” Walker concluded. “Benefits from environmental policy far exceed the costs.”