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Lori S. Bennear, Professor of Environmental Economics and Policy  

Office Location: Grainger Hall 5118, 9 Circuit Drive, Durham, NC 27708
Office Phone: +1 919 613 8083
Duke Box: 90328
Email Address: lori.bennear@duke.edu
Web Page: http://www.duke.edu/~lds5
Web Page: http://sites.nicholas.duke.edu/loribennear/

Areas of Expertise

  • Environment and Energy, Environmental Law, Regulation and Policy

Education:
Ph.D., Harvard University, 2002
M.A., Yale University, 1996
AB, Occidental College

Research Categories: Environmental Economics. Evaluation of effectiveness of environmental regulations

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

  1. Bennear, LS. "What do we really know? The effect of reporting thresholds on inferences using environmental right‐to‐know data." Regulation & Governance 2.3 (September, 2008): 293-315. [Gateway.cgi], [doi]  [abs]
  2. Bennear, LS; Olmstead, SM. "The impacts of the "right to know": Information disclosure and the violation of drinking water standards." Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 56.2 (January, 2008): 117-130. [doi]  [abs]
  3. Bennear, LS; Stavins, RN. "Second-best theory and the use of multiple policy instruments." Environmental and Resource Economics 37.1 (May, 2007): 111-129. [doi]  [abs]
  4. Bennear, LS. "Are Management-Based Regulations Effective?." Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 26.2 (2007): 327-348. [doi]  [abs]
  5. Bennear, LS; Stavins, RN; Wagner, A. "Private Options to Use Public Goods: Using Revealed Preferences to Estimate Environmental Benefits." Journal of Regulatory Economics 28.2 (2005): 157-180.
  6. Bennear, LS; Coglianese, C. "Measuring progress: Program evaluaton of environmental policies." Environment 47.2 (March, 2005): 22-39. [doi]
  7. Snyder, LD; Miller, NH; Stavins, RN. "The effects of environmental regulation on technology diffusion: The case of chlorine manufacturing." American Economic Review 93.2 (May, 2003): 431-435. [doi]
  8. Sadd, JL; Pastor, M; Boer, JT; Snyder, LD. ""Every breath you take ... ": The demographics of toxic air releases in Southern California." Economic Development Quarterly 13.2 (January, 1999): 107-123. [doi]  [abs]
  9. Boer, LSBWT; Sadd, J; Pastor, M. "Is There Environmental Racism: An Empirical Analysis of the Geographical Distribution of Hazardous Waste Facilities in Los Angeles County." Social Science Quarterly (December, 1997).
  10. Bennear, LS. "Evaluating Management-Based Regulation: A Valuable Tool in the Regulatory Tool Box?." Leveraging the Private Sector: Management-Based Strategies for Improving Environmental Performance. Ed. Coglianese, C; Nash, J. Resources for the Future Press, 2006. 51-86. [doi]
  11. Bennear, LS; Coglianese, C. "Program Evaluation of Environmental Policies: Toward Evidence-Based Decision Making." Decision Making for the Environment: Social and Behavioral Science Research Priorities. Ed. Brewer, GD; Stern, PC. National Academies Press, 2005.
  12. Bennear, LS; Jessoe, KK; Olmstead, SM. "Sampling out: regulatory avoidance and the Total Coliform Rule.." Environmental science & technology 43.14 (July, 2009): 5176-5182. [19708338], [doi]  [abs]
  13. L.S. Bennear, M. Baker-Goering, M. Lenox. "The Effectiveness of Information Disclosure: An Examination of the TRI."  2008
  14. M.B. Sullivan, L.S. Bennear, W.E. Painter, Jr.. "A Quasi-experimental Examination of Family Centered Treatment®: Outcomes for a Juvenile Delinquent Population."  2008
  15. L.S. Bennear and K.L. Dickinson. "The Role of Program Evaluation in Environmental Policy: A Critical Evaluation of the Incentives Created by GPRA and PART.."  2008 [pdf]

Curriculum Vitae

Highlight:
My research focuses on evaluating environmental policies and improving methods and techniques for conducting these evaluations. While the field of policy evaluation is a broad one, my specific niche is in bringing rigorous quantitative methods to evaluate environmental policy innovations along four dimensions.  (1) Evaluating the effectiveness of environmental policies and programs. This line of research uses statistical analysis to estimate the extent to which environmental policies such as information disclosure and management-based regulations actually improve corporate environmental performance, change household behavior, or improve individual environmental health indicators. (2) Evaluating strategic behavioral responses to non-traditional regulatory regimes. Environmental policies create incentives and in responding to these incentives, regulated entities sometimes behave strategically in ways that undermine program effectiveness.  This line of research seeks to illuminate these strategic behavioral responses and quantify the magnitude of their impact.  (3)  Assessing the distributional impacts of these new regulatory regimes. My research in this area evaluates whether innovations in regulatory policy result in uneven distribution of environmental impacts on lower income or minority communities.  (4)  Evaluating the role of program evaluation in environmental policy. My research identifies the barriers to and facilitators of increased use of evaluation in environmental policy.

Bio/Profile
Environmental and natural resource economics, applied microeconomics, and empirical methods. Her research focuses on estimating the effect of different regulatory innovations on measures of facility-level environmental performance, such as pollution levels, chemical use, and technology choice. Recent work has focused on measuring the effectiveness of management-based regulations, which require each regulated entity to develop its own internal rules and initiates to achieve reductions in pollution, as well as the effectiveness of regulations that mandate public reporting of toxic emissions.

Lori S. Bennear