We analyze excess emissions from industrial facilities in Texas using data from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Emissions are characterized as excess if they are beyond a facility's permitted levels and if they occur during startups, shutdowns, or malfunctions. We provide summary...

Policy efforts to address climate change are increasingly focused on adaptation, which commonly understood as adjustments in human systems to moderate the harm or exploit beneficial opportunities related to actual or expected climate impacts. In this paper we examine individual-level...

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...

Increased demand for U.S. electricity generation will require the construction of hundreds of new power plants in the coming decades. We examine attitudinal data from the 2008 MIT Energy Survey to measure public support for and opposition to the local siting of power plants. Substantial...

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...

Concerns that interstate economic competition will lead states to relax their environmental regulation, potentially resulting in a race to the bottom, remain commonplace in both academic and public policy debates about state environmental policy. Most of the existing empirical work examining the...

The need for greater public involvement in environmental decisionmaking has been highlighted in recent high-profile research reports and emphasized by leaders at all levels of government. In some cases, environmental agencies have opened the door to greater participation in their programs....

Public agencies at all levels of government have conducted comparative risk projects to inform environmental priority-setting efforts. Using the analytic policy tool, comparative risk analysis (CRA), most projects have ranked environmental problems in terms of the relative risks they pose to...

Public participation has become a standard component of environmental decision-making processes. Frequently used methods of public involvement, such as public comments and hearings, however, are too often reactive in nature, involve insufficient deliberation, and engage only a small number of...

Communities are increasingly turning to local environmental institutions (LEIs) to address unmet environmental challenges, and reform advocates point to such place-based solution as critical for addressing the shortcomings of the existing environmental protection system. Yet, there has been very...