Spillover Effects of Grocery Bag Legislation: Evidence of Bag Bans and Bag Fees

Yu-Kai Huang () and Richard Woodward
Additional contact information
Yu-Kai Huang: University of Georgia

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2022, vol. 81, issue 4, No 2, 741 pages

Abstract: Abstract We investigate the unintended consequences of carryout grocery bag (CGB) regulations by looking at the impact on sales of alternative plastic bag products. We extend the literature by studying two types of CGB regulations, bag bans and bag fees. Using retail scanner data and employing a general synthetic control method, we find that both types of CGB regulations are associated with significantly higher plastic trash bag sales. We estimate that CGB regulations lead to an average increase in purchased plastics of 127 pounds per store per month, ranging from 30 to 135 (37–224) pounds for 4-gallon (8-gallon) trash bags. These results confirm previous findings on bag bans and provide new evidence on bag fees. In general, the effects do not differ across CGB regulations, but some heterogeneity exists. Our results highlight unintentional spillover effects of narrowly targeted policies on other unregulated waste.

Keywords: Carryout grocery bag regulations; Scanner data; General synthetic control model; Unintentional policy effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10640-022-00646-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:enreec:v:81:y:2022:i:4:d:10.1007_s10640-022-00646-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... al/journal/10640/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10640-022-00646-5

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental & Resource Economics is currently edited by Ian J. Bateman

More articles in Environmental & Resource Economics from Springer, European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().