Document Type
Article
Date of Original Version
2018
Abstract
Understanding responses to government action is critical for developing efficient policy. In the context of land conservation, this paper examines whether municipal policy has a crowding-in or crowding-out effect on neighboring municipalities’ actions and state government actions. Importantly, we focus on municipal conservation referendums, which allow us to use a regression discontinuity framework for causal inference. Using data from Massachusetts and New Jersey, our findings suggest municipal conservation decisions have no effect on neighboring local governments’ or the state’s conservation activity.
Citation/Publisher Attribution
Lang, C., Prendergast, P., & Pearson-Merkowitz, S. (2018). How does municipal policy affect state and local actions? Evidence from land conservation spending. Resource and Energy Economics, 54, 23-36. doi: 10.1016/j.reseneeco.2018.06.001
Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.reseneeco.2018.06.001
Author Manuscript
This is a pre-publication author manuscript of the final, published article.
Terms of Use
This article is made available under the terms and conditions applicable
towards Open Access Policy Articles, as set forth in our Terms of Use.