Measuring the Stringency of Environmental Regulations

By Claire Brunel, Arik Levinson. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 2016

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Do environmental regulations discourage investment, reduce labor demand, or alter patterns of international trade? To answer these important policy questions, we need ways to measure the stringency of environmental regulations empirically. While creating measures of stringency is often characterized as a data collection challenge, we identify four fundamental conceptual obstacles to evaluating these measures: multidimensionality, simultaneity, industrial composition, and capital vintage. We then describe recent approaches used by researchers to measure the stringency of environmental regulations, primarily in the United States, and evaluate their success in light of these obstacles. We find that few approaches come close to being the ideal—a theoretically motivated, tractable, single measure that captures environmental regulatory stringency empirically.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3d26e93151d5644361e80caecbf3d49149ce18a3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. H. Diederich
2. Erik Hille
3. A. Zaklan
4. Wilhelm Althammer
5. Helene Naegele

In Strategy and Management

1. A. Zaklan
2. Helene Naegele

Citations in the corpus

• Environmental regulations and industrial competitiveness: evidence from China (2018, unknown): “Following Claire and Levinson (2016), we provide the following four challenges, quoting: (1) multidimensionality – environmental regulations cannot easily be captured by a single measure of ‘stringency’; (2) simultaneity – regulations are meant to affect emission levels, but emissions levels can…”
• Environmental regulation and innovation in renewable energy technologies: Does the policy instrument matter? (2020, background): “In addition, they are not or only partly affected by multidimensionality and simultaneity issues, which are common in the regulation intensity measurement (Brunel and Levinson 2016).”
• Does the EU ETS cause carbon leakage in European manufacturing? (2019, background): “(1995) and Brunel and Levinson (2016), we note that there are many possibly ways to measure environmental stringency.”