Environmental Permits, Regulatory Burden, and Firm Outcomes

Namrata Kala, Muhammad Haseeb and James Fenske
Additional contact information
Namrata Kala: MIT Sloan School of Management; BREAD; CEPR; J-PAL; NBER
Muhammad Haseeb: University of Bristol
James Fenske: University of Warwick

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: Effective regulatory design requires an understanding of how regulatory burden affects regulated entities. Using novel data on all applications for environmental permits in five Indian states and a natural experiment, we estimate how regulatory burden of environmental permitting affects firms. Difference-in-difference estimates show that deregulation induces smaller firms to enter and increases entry. Standard data sources would miss these substantial effects, underscoring the importance of collecting data across the firm size distribution. We also use full texts of permit certificates to create novel measures of regulatory burden. Firms in industries with reduced regulations face fewer, less stringent, permit conditions.

Keywords: JEL; Classification: (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... tions/wp784.2025.pdf

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:cge:wacage:784

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Snape ().