摘要：The purpose of this paper is to estimate inspection costs of environmental regulations in Sweden and to carry out econometric test of the allocation of inspections among heterogeneous firms at two different jurisdictional levels – county and municipality. The inspection task of environmental regulations is delegated from central to regional and local jurisdictional levels, and the authors test if and how the allocation of inspections among firms coincide with the intentions set by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA). A two-step approach is applied where, firstly, inspection cost functions are estimated, and, secondly, marginal costs are derived and tested against marginal environmental weights given by the SEPA. The test results indicate that the allocation of inspection costs among firms deviates from their relative environmental impacts as determined by SEPA at both the county and the municipality jurisdictional level. At both levels, relatively too much expenses are used for inspecting firms with relatively large marginal environmental impact.
关键词：inspection costs; heterogeneous firms; environmental regulation; Sweden; delegation; econometric test
