An Industry-Adjusted Index of State Environmental Compliance Costs

Arik Levinson

No 7297, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper describes a new, industry-adjusted index of state environmental compliance costs from 1977 to 1994. The index has two principal advantages: it controls for states' industrial compositions, and it can be calculated for 17 years, thus facilitating comparisons both among states and within states over time. Several notable facts emerge. First, differences in states' industrial compositions play a large role in determining their environmental compliance costs. Second, after controlling for industrial composition, the variance across states in compliance costs declined steadily between 1977 and 1994. Third, this cost index is negatively correlated with subjective indices of state environmental efforts compiled by various environmental organizations. In sum, the cost index described here provides some new data on historical trends in state regulatory differences, differs from the conventional wisdom regarding states' relative environmental efforts, and provides a useful tool for researchers exploring the effects of compliance costs on economic activity.

Date: 1999-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-env, nep-law, nep-pbe and nep-pub
Note: PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Published as An Industry-Adjusted Index of State Environmental Compliance Costs , Arik Levinson. in Behavioral and Distributional Effects of Environmental Policy , Carraro and Metcalf. 2001

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7297.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: An Industry-Adjusted Index of State Environmental Compliance Costs (2001)
Working Paper: An Industry-Adjusted Index of State Environmental Compliance Costs (1999)
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:nbr:nberwo:7297

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7297

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().