The Impact of Environmental Regulations on the Industry Structure of Landfills

Over the past 20 years, the environmental regulation of landfills has become increasingly restrictive, both at federal and state levels. We develop a theoretical framework to explain landfill operators' responses to regulatory actions, and then estimate an empirical model of changes in industry structure using a panel dataset of Ohio landfills. Because not all Ohio counties have landfill operations, we hypothesize that there is self selection in the siting of landfills which we account for with an appropriate econometric model. We find that environmental regulations had significant impact both on the location of landfill operations and concentration of the industry during the time period studied