Informed Enforcement: Lessons from Pollution Monitoring in China

Sebastian Axbard and Zichen Deng

No 15622, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Government regulations are often imperfectly enforced by public officials. In this study, we exploit the introduction of air pollution monitors in China to investigate if real-time monitoring of policy outcomes affects the enforcement of existing regulations. Using assignment criteria established by the central government and new geo-referenced data on local enforcement activities, we show that monitoring: 1) increases enforcement against local firms, 2) improves the targeting of enforcement, and 3) reduces aggregate pollution. These effects are driven by officials facing performance incentives and are stronger when there is limited scope for data manipulation, suggesting that real-time monitoring improves top-down accountability.

Keywords: Accountability; Regulatory enforcement; Pollution; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q53 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15622 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Informed Enforcement: Lessons from Pollution Monitoring in China (2024)
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:cpr:ceprdp:15622

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15622

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().