Presented at the AERE Summer Conference:
Each year, AERE selects an outstanding research paper published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists during the previous calendar year.
"The Clean Air Act Watch List: An Enforcement and Compliance Natural Experiment"
by Mary F. Evans
Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, volume 3, number 3, pp. 627-65, 2016.This research asks the question: can traditional regulation of the environment be improved or replaced by public release of information about polluting facilities? The 2016 JAERE paper by Mary Evans makes two major contributions in this literature. First, it is a model of academic innovation in identification. It uses an accidental public release of facilities’ identities on an EPA Clean Air Act “watch list” to identify the impacts of both traditional and informational policies in what is essentially a national quasi-experiment. Second, it measures the complementarity of government oversight and civil action: government oversight is effective but can be substantially more effective when information regarding that oversight enters the public realm. The paper includes an extensive series of robustness checks that rule out potential confounding factors, and it provides a benchmark of best practice in quasi-experimental evaluation. For regulators, her paper provides potential new management tools that are easy to implement and likely to make real world impacts. For researchers, her paper provides a robust, well executed, and highly policy relevant blueprint for examining non-traditional forms of regulatory impacts.
Congrats Mary!
