CMC professor Mary Evans P’21 was recently recognized with the prestigious Ralph C. d’Arge and Allen V. Kneese Award for Outstanding Publication in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (JAERE). Evans, the Jerrine and Thomas Mitchell ’66 Associate Professor of Environmental Economics and George R. Roberts Fellow, teaches environmental economics in the Robert Day School of Economics and Finance.
The gravity of this annual award speaks to its namesakes, d'Arge and Kneese, who were both preeminent scholars in environmental and natural resource economics. A founding member of AERE, d’Arge is recognized as one of the creators of the field of environmental economics. Similarly, Kneese was associated with environmental and resource policy think tank Resources for the Future. As an early theorist on “green taxes,” he proposed that market-driven incentives could play a role in pollution regulation, which ultimately influenced environmental policy worldwide.
Professor Evans received the award for her publication, “The Clean Air Act Watch List: An Enforcement and Compliance Natural Experiment,” which appeared in JAERE in September 2016. The journal is distributed by the University of Chicago Press, and serves as one of two flagship publications for the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists along with the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy (REEP).
Professor Evans’ research examines the effectiveness of an EPA watch list used to track environmental violations. The results of her study “confirm that regulated facilities respond to traditional enforcement measures such as more frequent inspections and penalties as well as to non-traditional measures that provide citizens and other stakeholders information on the environmental performance of regulated facilities.”
“The findings,” she said, “are timely given that likely reductions in enforcement budgets will decrease the use of traditional measures and therefore increase the relevance of non-traditional measures.”
—Michael Tesauro