The Pace of Progress at Superfund Sites: Policy Goals and Interest Group Influence
研究了美国超级基金污染场地清理各阶段所需时间，发现环保局并未按危害程度优先处理，而责任方和当地社区等集中利益集团显著影响进度，责任方造成的延误使清理净效益降低8%。
Bureaucracies may set priorities for their workload in response to social goals or pressures from concentrated private interests. This paper explores bureaucratic priorities empirically by studying Superfund, the federal program for cleaning up contaminated sites. It examines the amount of time that sites on Superfund’s National Priorities List require to complete three stages from listing to cleanup, using an econometric method for multiple sequential durations. The empirical results provide little evidence that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) prioritizes sites according to their harms. By contrast, concentrated private interests, such as liable parties and local communities, play an important role in the EPA’s priorities. Delays caused by liable parties may reduce net benefits of cleanup by 8 percent. This result suggests a benefit from funding provision of environmental quality and other public goods through diffuse sources, such as broad‐based taxes, to avoid the detrimental effects of such concentrated interests.