Drilling Like There’s No Tomorrow: Bankruptcy, Insurance, and Environmental Risk
利用德克萨斯州行政数据，研究保险要求变化如何影响企业破产规避能力，发现该政策改善了小型企业的环境表现并减少了产量，同时将生产重新分配给环境记录更好的大型企业。
This paper measures the effects of bankruptcy protection on industry structure and environmental outcomes in oil and gas extraction. Using administrative data from Texas, I exploit variation in an insurance requirement that reduced firms’ ability to avoid liability through bankruptcy. Among small firms, the policy substantially improved environmental outcomes and reduced production. Most production was reallocated to larger firms with better environmental records, but high-cost production where social cost may have exceeded social benefit decreased. These results suggest that incomplete internalization of environmental costs due to bankruptcy is an important determinant of industry structure and safety effort in hazardous industries.