The impact of monitoring and enforcement on air pollutant emissions

Monitoring and enforcement are an important part of any regulatory regime, and the costs of such regulatory actions should be justified by improvements in environmental performance. Among air pollutants, particulate matter has the greatest health impacts: the EPA estimates that reductions in ambient particulate matter will have prevented 195,500 cases of premature mortality by 2020. This article is the first to study the impact of monitoring and enforcement actions on emissions of criteria pollutants, which are commonly found air pollutants such as ozone and particulate matter. Previous research on criteria pollutants has been limited as data are not easily available. This article studies both specific and general deterrence. It shows that penalties produce a small but statistically significant specific deterrence impact and inspections produce a general deterrence impact: increasing the average number of inspections at other facilities in the same county by one decreases emissions by 2.7 %.