Shanti Gamper-Rabindran

Nafta and the Environment: What Can the Data Tell Us?

Critics of trade liberalization agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have expressed concerns that polluting industries will locate in developing countries to evade more stringent regulation, with adverse environmental consequences. A study of NAFTA’s effects on U.S.‐Mexico trade finds that despite differences in the stringency of U.S. and Mexican environmental policies, NAFTA did not cause Mexico to specialize in dirtier industries between 1989 and 1999. Regarding the location of manufacturing production during the NAFTA transition, although growth was fastest in the congested Mexican border region, growth declined in the congested central region and increased in the less congested interior region, with all regions shifting toward less polluting industries. Most of the observed measures of air quality in the border region, which can serve as an indicator of NAFTA’s short‐term scale effects, do not exhibit significant breaks in their trend of improvement.

Information Collection, Access and Dissemination to Support Evidence-Based Shale Policies

To ensure that unconventional shale gas development (UGD) yields net social benefits, we need to identify the magnitude and distribution of its benefits and costs and develop effective technological, management and regulatory strategies to minimize potential adverse effects. A major obstacle in achieving these goals is the gaps in the collection, access and dissemination of information. This paper focuses on informational gaps in assessing a narrow subset of the potential links between UGD and well water contamination, drawing particularly from the experience in Pennsylvania. It suggests strategies for legislators, regulators, industry, and researchers to address these informational gaps, while protecting legitimate privacy concerns. The benefits from improved understanding of the impact of this industry and resulting innovations to mitigate its impacts justifies the costs of data collection, access and dissemination.

Mandatory disclosure of plant emissions into the environment and worker chemical exposure inside plants

Our study is the first to test if mandatory pollution disclosure programs, exemplified by the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) program, reduce worker chemical exposure. We examine newly available measurements of personal exposure to air contaminants at 1333 plants in the US chemical manufacturing sector between 1984 and 2009. The maximum ratio of exposure to the legal limits per inspection declined substantially, by 11%, in the post-program period. This result provides the first evidence of a reduction in measured risks coinciding with the inception of the TRI program. We find suggestive, not conclusive, evidence to attribute this reduction in part to the TRI program. Our preferred specifications find that plants that are more responsive to the TRI program, as indicated by larger industry-level TRI emission reduction, had 6.5% to 8% lower exposure. However, not all models find statistically significant larger exposure reductions in plants that are more responsive to the TRI program.

Does Self-Regulation Reduce Pollution? Responsible Care in the Chemical Industry

Self-regulation programs, in which industry associations set membership codes beyond government regulations, are prevalent despite scarce evidence on their effectiveness. We examine Responsible Care (RC) in the US chemical manufacturing sub-sector, whose membership codes include pollution prevention, using our author-constructed panel database of 3,278 plants owned by 1,759 firms between 1988 and 2001. We instrument for a plant’s parent firm’s self-selection into the program, using: (i) the characteristics of other plants belonging to the same firm in our multi-plant sample; and (ii) firm participation in the industry association before the establishment of RC and industry level RC participation in our full sample. We find that on average, plants owned by RC participating firms raise their toxicity-weighted pollution by 15.9% relative to statistically-equivalent plants owned by non-RC participating firms. This estimated increase is large relative to the yearly 4% reduction in pollution among all plants in our sample between 1988 and 2001. Moreover, RC raises plant-level pollution intensity by 15.1%. These results caution against reliance on self-regulation programs modeled on the pre-2002 RC program that did not require third party certification and in those sectors that lack independent third party certification.

Does Industry Self-Regulation Reduce Accidents? Responsible Care in the Chemical Sector

Our study, examining the impact of Responsible Care in the US chemical manufacturing sector, is the first to test the impact of self-regulation program on industrial accidents. RC requires members to adhere to codes of conduct on production safety and pollution prevention. Using our author-constructed database of 1,867 firms that own 2,963 plants between 1988 and 2001, we instrument for firms’ self-selection into RC using pollution-related regulatory pressure on firms that influences their probability of joining RC, but not plant-level accidents. We find that RC reduces the likelihood of accidents by 2.99 accidents per 100 plants in a given year or by 69.3%. RC also reduces the likelihood of process safety accidents and accidents related to violations of RC codes by 5.75 accidents per 100 plants in a given year or by 85.9%. Alternatively, estimates using Propensity Score Matching methods indicate that RC reduces the likelihood of accidents by 0.66 accidents per 100 plants in a given year. We conclude that the RC-led reduction in the likelihood of accidents contributes to economically significant averted losses, with savings, even based on the smaller PSM estimates, totaling

Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West

180 million per year.

Did the EPA's Voluntary Industrial Toxics Program Reduce Emissions? A GIS Analysis of Distributional Impacts and By-Media Analysis of Substitution

Republican, on p. 92) reminds us that such anthologies do not necessarily have the same level of review as do journal contributions. The concluding chapter, by the book’s three editors, is particularly clear and insightful regarding the characteristics of resilience and the challenges that lie ahead for applying it to crisis response. Resilience is a new way of seeing, and a more effective way of responding ‘‘to an ever more dangerous world’’ (p. 273). It is a way of reframing the logic of how we cope, emphasizing long-term collective action and decentralization, rather than the military model of responding to crises. In a rational technological age, many people will find this approach to be counterintuitive, but the book’s contributors use considerable evidence to argue their case. For instance, and most importantly as observed by the book’s editors, resilience is about learning: ‘‘The basis for resilience is the human capacity to learn, both from prior experience, including error, and from examples of innovative or effective performance’’ (p. 278). I greatly valued the opportunity to read this book, despite having read too many recent papers on resilience. For an edited volume, it presents a generally clearly written, well framed, persuasive and thoughtful set of arguments for rethinking crisis management using principles of resilience. Researchers from a variety of related fields, such as public policy, political science, emergency management, public administration, and urban planning, will find much of value in this book. I also hope that it finds its way onto the desks of administrators of public agencies and other large organizations, because it can provide them the evidence they need to redesign, or argue for the redesign of, their approaches to crisis management.