Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Daily Overview |
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Local Air Pollution and Enforcement Location: B131 Session Chair: Roger von Haefen, NC State University | |
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Demographic Change and Discretion in Environmental Enforcement Heidelberg University, Germany This paper examines how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency advances environmental justice through enforcement of the Clean Air Act. Using a comprehensive panel of regulated facilities from 2000 to 2018, we implement an event-study design that exploits variation in the timing and location of racial demographic shifts. We find that increases in the share of non-White residents are followed by a persistent decline in inspection rates by state regulators. This decline is not observed for federal inspections, which follow more standardized enforcement protocols. To understand the pattern, we first rule out changes in regulatory need by showing that compliance outcomes and ambient air quality do not improve following demographic shifts. We then examine three aspects of regulatory discretion: local economic conditions, political engagement, and institutional targeting. Inspection rates fall only when discretion is unconstrained. Most notably, the decline disappears after 2012 when the EPA introduced the Environmental Justice Screening Tool, which standardized the use of demographic and environmental risk information in enforcement decisions. | |