Discretionary Exemptions from Environmental Regulation: Flexibility for Good or for Ill

Dietrich Earnhart, Sarah Jacobson, Yusuke Kuwayama and Richard Woodward

No 2019-11, Department of Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics, Williams College

Abstract: We develop a model of firm and regulator behavior to examine theoretically the use and consequences of discretionary exemptions (also known as variances, waivers, or exceptions) in environmental regulation. Many environmental protection laws, such as the Clean Water Act, impose limits on harmful activities yet include "safety valve" provisions giving the regulator discretion to grant full or partial exemptions that provide permanent or temporary relief from these limits. This discretion begets flexibility over the stringency of environmental protection laws. Our model places a profit-maximizing discharger of pollution under the purview of a fully informed regulator who may seek to maximize social welfare by imposing limits. We show that when a regulation does not otherwise allow flexibility, an exemption that relaxes the limit for firms with high abatement costs can improve social welfare by reducing the costs of achieving the given level of environmental quality. We further demonstrate that if the effectiveness of abatement technology improves over time, a temporary exemption can increase social welfare by adjusting allowable pollution in response to these dynamic conditions. We also show that if the labor market is sticky, exemptions can benefit workers. Driven by an unequally weighted social welfare function, the regulator may use exemptions to meet redistributive ends. However, these beneficial impacts of exemptions rely on a fully informed and benevolent regulator; otherwise, the discretionary nature of exemptions leaves them open to abuse. A regulator who is captured by industry, focused only on her own jurisdiction or answerable only to a set of elites, can abuse exemptions in ways that reduce social welfare, such as allowing inefficiently high pollution or inducing a cost-ineffective pattern of abatement.

Keywords: variance; exemption; regulation; flexibility; discretion; welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 D62 K32 Q52 Q53 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2019-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-law and nep-res
Note: Also issued as RFF Working Paper 19-20
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/WP_19-20_Kuwayama_et_al.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Discretionary Exemptions from Environmental Regulation: Flexibility for Good or for Ill (2023)
Working Paper: Discretionary Exemptions from Environmental Regulation: Flexibility for Good or for Ill (2020)
Working Paper: Discretionary Exemptions from Environmental Regulation: Flexibility for Good or for Ill (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wil:wileco:2019-11

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

The price is Free.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics, Williams College Williamstown, MA 01267. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stephen Sheppard ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).