Monitoring and Enforcement and Environmental Compliance: Power Plant Emissions During the 2018–19 Federal Government Shutdown

We show that firms strategically reduce their compliance effort when monitoring and enforcement unexpectedly decline in the short run. We use the Environmental Protection Agency’s furlough during the 2018–19 federal government shutdown as a natural experiment to analyze the change in daily air emissions from coal-fired power plants in the United States over a 30-day period. Using an engineering-based approach we confirm that coal-fired power plants increased daily particulate matter emissions during the furlough of federal employees by temporarily reducing end-of-pipe pollution control. At the same time, consistent with our expectations, there is no detectable increase in daily emissions of SO2 and NOX during the furlough, because they are continuously monitored and the furlough did not represent a change in the stringency of monitoring and enforcement for these pollutants.