* Local Knowledge or Misallocation: Efficiency Costs of Discretion in Regulatory Enforcement
Author: Yunyu Shu, Ruozi Song and Bing Zhang
Enforcement of environmental regulations matters for the effectiveness
(Duflo et al., 2018; Buntaine et al., 2022)
Incentives of local regulators can be misaligned with environmental regulations
• Principal-agent problem
(Greenstone et al., 2022)
• Strategic responses from local regulators
(He et al., 2020; Zou, 2021; Xie and Yuan, 2023)
• Heterogeneity in regulators
(Kahn et al., 2015; Fang et al., 2023)
Open Questions
• How important is the role of local regulators on the effectiveness of environmental regulations?
• Do local regulators have private information to target ”right” firms or there is a misallocation in who to target?
* China’s Ecological Restoration: Evidence from the Last 20 Years
Author: Eric Zou, Guojun He, Yuanning Liang, Yuhang Pan, Jianwei Xing, and Zheng Zhong
Links to Slides
To be continued