THIRD‐PARTY CERTIFICATION AND THE EFFECTIVENESS OF VOLUNTARY POLLUTION ABATEMENT PROGRAMS: EVIDENCE FROM RESPONSIBLE CARE
研究了责任关怀项目强制要求第三方认证后，对参与企业排放的因果影响，发现平均而言认证并未显著降低排放，结果对多种模型设定稳健。
We analyze whether third‐party certification has been successful in improving the performance of voluntary pollution abatement in the Responsible Care (RC) program which made certification mandatory from 2005 onward. We use facility‐level panel data from 821 plants between 1996 and 2010, and exploit the change in the program requirements to estimate the causal impact of third‐party certification on participating facility emissions compared to non‐RC plants in the U.S. chemical industry. We address endogenous selection into RC via instrumental variables, and explore heterogeneity in the treatment effect. We find that, on average, there is no statistically discernible effect of third‐party certification on facility emissions, and that this result is robust to a variety of models that correspond to different assumptions related to identification.