Grantee Research Project Results
2003 Progress Report: Hazardous Waste Compliance and the Influence of Federal Initiatives, State Programs, and Corporate Characteristics
EPA Grant Number: R831036Title: Hazardous Waste Compliance and the Influence of Federal Initiatives, State Programs, and Corporate Characteristics
Investigators: Stafford, Sarah L.
Institution: College of William and Mary-VA
EPA Project Officer: Hahn, Intaek
Project Period: June 1, 2003 through May 1, 2006
Project Period Covered by this Report: June 1, 2003 through May 1, 2004
Project Amount: $137,997
RFA: Corporate Environmental Behavior: Examining the Effectiveness of Government Interventions and Voluntary Initiatives (2002) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Environmental Justice
Objective:
This research project is an empirical examination of the factors that motivate compliance with hazardous waste regulations. The analysis includes more than 8,000 hazardous waste generators and management facilities across the United States, representing a wide array of industries. The objective of this research project is to address three major questions:
(1) How do audit policies affect hazardous waste compliance?
(2) How do state initiatives affect hazardous waste compliance?
(3) How do corporate and facility characteristics affect hazardous waste compliance?
The objective of these lines of inquiry is to provide a better understanding of the effects of various regulatory and nonregulatory factors on compliance so that policies can be better designed and implemented to promote compliance and increase environmental protection.
Progress Summary:
A fundamental step towards answering these questions is the collection and compilation of necessary data. We have extracted data on detected violations and state and federal inspections from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Resource Conservation and Recovery Act Information database and combined them with data on waste generation and management from EPA’s Biennial Reporting System. To address the first objective, how audit policies have affected hazardous waste compliance, we compiled data on the use of audit policies from documents in the audit docket and from EPA enforcement databases. We also collected information on state environmental audit and self-policing programs. We first examined the effect of voluntary disclosures made under EPA’s Audit Policy on future enforcement efforts and determined that facilities that disclose are rewarded with a lower probability of inspection in the future and that facilities with good compliance records that disclose get a smaller benefit from disclosure than facilities with bad records. Preliminary analysis also suggests that facilities that are not targeted by enforcement efforts are less likely to self-disclose, whereas facilities that are inspected frequently are more likely to disclose, perhaps because they have more to gain from disclosure (that is, the possibility of decreasing future enforcement efforts). In terms of overall compliance, we do not find any evidence that the federal Audit Policy has improved compliance significantly. State audit legislation, however, does appear to have increased compliance slightly. Finally, we also examined the factors that have affected state adoption of environmental audit legislation and self-policing policies.
Future Activities:
To address the second two objectives, we are collecting and compiling data from a number of sources. We also are matching hazardous waste facilities with corporate parents and gathering financial data on these facilities from several electronic databases. Once we have amassed the necessary data, we will conduct a variety of cross-section and panel regressions to estimate the effect of various state initiatives and corporate characteristics on hazardous waste compliance. To account for the fact that compliance status is known only if a facility is inspected, we are using a censored bivariate probit as the basic framework for analysis.
Supplemental Keywords:
monitoring, deterrence, self-policing, self-reporting, targeting, large quantity generator, audit policies, compliance costs, corporate environmental behavior, decision analysis, decisionmaking, regulatory impact,, RFA, Scientific Discipline, Economic, Social, & Behavioral Science Research Program, Economics and Business, decision-making, Environmental Law, Economics & Decision Making, Social Science, impact of state policy instruments, policy analysis, impact of federal policy instruments, policy incentives, policy making, hazardous waste regulatory compliance, decision analysis, decision making, economic benefits, environmental decision making, legislative initiatives, measuring environmental performance, economic incentives, audit policies, environmental policy, regulatory reform, compliance costs, enforcement impact, legal and policy choices, public policy, regulatory impactRelevant Websites:
http://faculty.wm.edu/slstaf/ Exit
Progress and Final Reports:
Original AbstractThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.