Time: 2022/09/14 8:00 – 9:30 pm (Beijing Time)

Title: Citizen Complaints and Regulator Behavior

About the speaker:

Jonathan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Virginia, and the Co-Founder and Director of the Environmental Inequality Lab. Jonathan is an environmental economist, who also works in the area of growth and development economics. His research combines data with insights from economic theory and environmental science to better understand how economic activity and the environment influence one another. His research has been published in leading academic journals, including Science, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the Journal of Health Economics, and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

Abstract:

Almost all U.S. regulatory statutes, and every major environmental law, allow for citizen engagement. The effects of citizen engagement on regulators, facilities, and the public, however, remains poorly understood. Exploiting newly available administrative data on over 130,000 unique citizen complaints submitted to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality between 2003 and 2019, we present new stylized facts and provide early evidence on the effect of citizen engagement on regulatory monitoring and enforcement decisions. Almost all complaints are investigated. The overall effect of these complaint-induced investigations, however, is theoretically ambiguous. We estimate that a citizen complaint against a facility is associated with a 51 percentage point increase in the likelihood of an investigation in the month the complaint was lodged and a 22 percentage point increase in the subsequent month. We also estimate that complaints are associated with an increase in notices of violation and enforcement, alongside an increase in non-complaint-related investigations up to 6 months after a complaint. Our findings suggest that citizen complaints can be an effective way to enhance regulatory efficiency.