Does Politics Matter in EPA's Monitoring Activities? Evidence from Facility Level Data on Enforcement of Clean Air Laws

Robert Innes () and Arnab Mitra

No 6128, 2008 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2008, Orlando, Florida from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association)

Abstract: This paper studies the potential effects of political pressure on environmental law enforcement in the Unites States. Prior work, most notably the key works of Deily and Gray, document the sensitivity of U.S. environmental enforcement to economic circumstances of regulated firms. However, the sensitivity of environmental enforcement may be motivated not only by cost-benefit criterion (economic costs of environmental enforcement against troubled firms in high unemployment areas are high) but also by political considerations, and most likely both. We are interested in identifying whether political influence directly affected environmental enforcement during the years 1990-2005, which cover most part of the Bush and Clinton administrations. Using political, demographic and income related data from various sources and mapping them with EPA's data on facility level inspection, we find evidence that political processes at the local, state and federal level do matter for facility level inspection.

Keywords: Environmental; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-pol and nep-reg
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea08:6128

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.6128

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