In this article, we examine the cumulative impact of state environmental protection policies and environmental quality on the health of state residents in the United States. Using a series of path analytic models, we simultaneously analyze the effect of state environmental policies on...

Political jurisdictions have incentives to promote pollution spillovers to capture the benefits of economic production within their borders while exporting the environmental costs to their neighbors. The authors examine the extent to which U.S. states engage in this type of free-riding behavior....

Interjurisdictional pollution spillovers are a critical issue in U.S. environmental policy. When policy responsibility is decentralized, state governmental agencies have incentives to promote these externalities to capture the benefits of economic activity within their borders while compelling...

Environmental policy is a central piece of President Obama’s domestic policy agenda. Congressional gridlock, however, has frequently compelled the Obama Administration to turn to the tools of the administrative presidency to achieve its goals. While executive authority has enabled the...

I examine the environmental race to the bottom argument by studying whether state susceptibility to interstate economic competition helps explain which U.S. states engage in environmental regulatory competition. Specifically, I create a susceptibility index using four state economic attributes...

Does environmental regulation vary over poor and minority communities? An uneven governmental response may follow from regulators' varying incentives to negotiate enforcement challenges. We argue that regulators confront two in particular. Regulators can pursue political enforcement, responding...

This article examines several of the key hypotheses suggested by the race to the bottom theory in environmental regulation. The research studies annual state-level enforcement of federal air, water, and hazardous waste pollution control regulation, covering the period from 1985-2000....