Conference Agenda

This paper analyses the impact of enforcement actions, proxied by inspections, on facilities’ compliance behaviour in Ireland between 2016 and 2019. We use a novel dataset covering enforcement records for the universe of regulated facilities across sectors. We use panel count data models to exploit the richness of the data. The paper finds that environmental enforcement and monitoring is effective at deterring non-compliance in Ireland. While it generally takes over a year for facilities to transition to compliant status, we find that non-compliant facilities start reducing the frequency of violations at least one quarter earlier. Moreover, we find that dynamic enforcement plays an important role in anticipating violations. Our results also show that sectoral-level probabilities of non-compliance identify sectors with larger concentrations of facilities with high-risk of violating environmental licence conditions. Both individual- and sectoral-level risk-based targeting approaches should be used in the implementation of environmental policy.

This paper studies the unintended effect of environmental regulation on the control of bureaucrats by politicians. In 2016 a reform of the mining sector in India, extended the requirement of environmental clearance to small sand mines, entrusting high ranking bureaucrats (District Collectors), with the decision power of granting environmental permits for sand mining. We analyse the impact of the reform on the behaviours of politicians, bureaucrats, and their interaction. We find that in districts more suitable to mining, the reform has reduced district collectors' tenure while increasing their turnover, a tool used by politicians to control bureaucrats. We show that a reduction in tenure is associated with worse district performance in terms of rural development outcomes.

Randomly assigning inspectors and subjects is considered a method to reduce the chances of collusion between supervisors and the entities they regulate. Using over 160,000 inspection records from 2016 to 2019, we examined the effect of China’s implementation of randomized environmental inspections on enforcement efficiency, as measured by the occurrence of violation judgments against inspected firms. Our findings indicate a notable reduction in efficiency with random inspections, which identified 37% fewer environmental issues and issued 73% fewer violation judgments than those conducted through a discretionary process. This decrease in efficiency can be attributed to the way random inspections impede local officials’ ability to use their discretion in targeting polluting firms and their specialized knowledge in effectively identifying violations. Yet, our findings also indicate that random assignment of inspectors does indeed reduce the likelihood of collusion, and this method is particularly effective in scenarios where there is a significant potential for collusion. To develop more effective strategies, policymakers should weigh the benefits of random inspection in reducing collusion against the drawbacks in losing target and expertise.

Environmental complaints by the public are a low-cost source of information and a potential means by which local officials can enhance the enforcement of environmental regulations. However, there is little research that investigates whether officials do respond to citizen complaints and equally importantly, whether complaints divert limited resources from other types of inspections. This paper investigates the impact of environmental complaints on the allocation and intensity of on-site inspections on the environmental governance of Jiangsu province which is one of the more heavily industrialized provinces in China. Using a data set of 25,756 complaints involving 12,100 firms, across 13 cities in Jiangsu from 2018 to 2019 we apply a Local Projection Model to estimate the effect of complaints on the probability of inspection. We find that complaints trigger an immediate and sustained response from the regulator, increasing the probability of an inspection by about 15% in the month of the complaint and continuing to increase over the following two months. The impact of such complaints is positive in that complaints do not significantly reduce the number of other types of inspections and may even increase the number of unplanned inspections, thereby increasing overall regulatory intensity. Complaints also increase the probability of regulators subsequently detecting environmental violations. Our study suggests that encouraging public complaints act as a bottom-up approach to regulation that can effectively complement the existing inspection system.