NIMBY Taxes Matter: State Taxes and Interstate Hazardous Waste Shipments

This paper examines the extent to which state taxes have inhibited interstate transport of" hazardous waste for disposal in the United States. It uses panel data from the Toxics Release" Inventory (TRI) and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) on interstate" shipments of waste, and analyzes them in conjunction with a set of state characteristics hazardous waste disposal taxes and disposal capacity. It employs four approaches to deal with" the potential endogeneity of taxes and unobserved heterogeneity among states: a "natural" experiment fixed-effects model reinterpretation of the coefficient on the distance among" states. The paper concludes that hazardous waste taxes are a statistically and economically" significant deterrent to interstate waste transport, that taxes are being imposed by large-capacity" and large-import states, and that therefore these taxes have had a decentralizing effect on the" national pattern of hazardous waste transport and disposal.