Do Nonprofits Encourage Environmental Compliance?

Laura Grant and Katherine K. Grooms

Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 2017, vol. 4, issue S1, S261 - S288

Abstract: When states incompletely monitor or enforce, environmental nonprofits step in. We estimate the impact of these groups on industrial compliance with the Clean Water Act, as well as their effect on government monitoring and enforcement. We geographically link annual panel data on facility inspection rates, pollution violations, and enforcement actions with information about nearby nonprofit watershed groups. In addition to two-stage least squares estimation for endogenous efforts of nonprofits, governments, and firms, we implement a recent advance in nonlinear methods with improved fit for our fractional dependent variables. As the number of nonprofit groups increase, government decreases inspections and firms have fewer severe effluent violations. The nonprofits’ oversight substitutes for government efforts by interacting directly with facilities rather than putting pressure on regulatory mechanisms. The interventions by these environmeVntal groups encourage compliance and, based on theory, improve efficiency.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/692508 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/692508 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:jaerec:doi:10.1086/692508

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().