Addressing Environmental Justice through In-Kind Court Settlements
Pamela Campa and
Lucija Muehlenbachs
No 16293, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers
Abstract:
Cash penalties in US environmental court cases can be mitigated if a defendant volunteers to undertake an in-kind project in the location of their violation, for example, by creating an education program or building a public park. A stated goal of the policy is to address environmental justice concerns for low-income and minority populations. However, the historical record shows in-kind settlements most likely occur in the cases involving high-income, majority-white communities. The welfare implications of this inequality are not straightforward. We find evidence that punishment in kind is more lenient than in cash: firms volunteering in-kind projects receive positive reactions by the public and the stock market. More leniency could have implications for future environmental violations. Taking intertemporal environmental quality into account, we estimate a dynamic social welfare function and find that in-kind settlements are nonetheless beneficial. Counterfactuals with a representative social planner would result in more in-kind settlements than under the current institutional setup.
Keywords: Environmental justice; Environmental enforcement; Corporate penalties; Deterrence; Social welfare weights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 H23 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16293 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
Related works:
Journal Article: Addressing Environmental Justice through In-Kind Court Settlements (2024) 
Working Paper: Addressing Environmental Justice through In-Kind Court Settlements (2023) 
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:16293
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16293
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().