Impact of Government-Sponsored Pollution Prevention Practices on Environmental Compliance and Enforcement: Evidence from a Sample of US Manufacturing Facilities

A two-way fixed effects Poisson model is used to investigate the impact of 43 EPA-sponsored pollution prevention (P2) practices on compliance and enforcement for a sample of facilities in the US manufacturing sector. I find that P2 adoption reduces environmental violations in three industries while increasing violations in two others. P2 adoption also spurs fewer enforcement actions in three industries. I further partition the P2 practices into three categories based on their approach to improve environmental performance. In doing so, I find that practices that involve changes in operating procedures--about a third of adopted P2 practices--such as instituting a self-inspection and monitoring program to discover spills or leak sources, improving maintenance scheduling and/or labeling procedures, are effective in reducing violations while practices that involve equipment or material changes are not. I also find that adopters of practices that require changes in either procedures or manufacturing equipment--about half of adopted practices--are rewarded with a more cooperative treatment of environmental infractions with fewer enforcement actions.Pollution Prevention Act, P2 practices, compliance, enforcement, Poisson models, Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Q53, L51, C23,

Semiparametric Estimation of Consumer Demand Systems with Micro Data

This article proposes a semiparametric two-step procedure for estimating a censored consumer demand system with micro data. The semiparametric estimator considered in the first step is suggested by Klein and Spady (1993). This estimator, used as a counterpart of the probit estimator in a conventional two-step model, does not make any distributional assumptions about the disturbances and so is exempt from model misspecification and plausible heteroscedasticity. In the second step, we motivate the choice of the Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) as an economic representation of consumers' demand behavior. Implementing our proposed semiparametric two-step procedure as well as Shonkwiler and Yen (1999)'s two-step model to a household meat consumption dataset from China generates the price and expenditure elasticities of demand. We also conducted the Horrowitz and H01rdle (1994)'s specification test to our data and reject the null.censoring, semiparametric estimator, consumer demand system, food expenditures, Demand and Price Analysis,

Gravitino cosmology in supersymmetric warm inflation

In supersymmetric models of warm inflation, the large temperature of the radiation bath produced by the dissipative motion of the inflaton field may induce a significant thermal abundance of potentially dangerous gravitinos. While previous discussions of this problem focused on gravitino production only at the end of warm inflation, similarly to conventional reheating scenarios, we study the full evolution of the gravitino abundance during and after inflation for simple monomial potentials, taking into account the enhanced gravitino and possibly gaugino masses due to supersymmetry breaking during inflation and the smooth transition into a radiation-dominated era. We find, on one hand, that the continuous thermal production increases the gravitino yield, although, on the other hand, `freeze-out' occurs at temperatures much lower than previously estimated. Moreover, for sufficiently strong dissipation, which allows for sub-planckian inflaton values, the lower radiation temperature significantly alleviates and possibly solves the gravitino problem, with a baryon asymmetry being nevertheless produced through dissipative effects. Our analysis may also be relevant to standard reheating as an oscillating inflaton will also change the gravitino mass, potentially modifying the produced gravitino yield.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figures. Published version Phys.Rev.