Measuring the Stringency of Environmental Regulations

Claire Brunel and Arik Levinson

Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 2016, vol. 10, issue 1, 47-67

Abstract: Do environmental regulations discourage investment, reduce labor demand, or alter patterns of international trade? To answer these important policy questions, we need ways to measure the stringency of environmental regulations empirically. While creating measures of stringency is often characterized as a data collection challenge, we identify four fundamental conceptual obstacles to evaluating these measures: multidimensionality, simultaneity, industrial composition, and capital vintage. We then describe recent approaches used by researchers to measure the stringency of environmental regulations, primarily in the United States, and evaluate their success in light of these obstacles. We find that few approaches come close to being the ideal—a theoretically motivated, tractable, single measure that captures environmental regulatory stringency empirically.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (98)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/reep/rev019 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:renvpo:v:10:y:2016:i:1:p:47-67.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Environmental Economics and Policy is currently edited by Robert Stavins

More articles in Review of Environmental Economics and Policy from Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().