Corporate Pollution and Local Community

Abstract

This dissertation explores the limits of formal and informal institutions in promoting environmentally sustainable practices. In particular, this dissertation focuses on the potential misalignment between the domain in which these institutional forces operate and the varying scope of externalities generated by corporate pollution. This dissertation specifically highlights the sustainability challenges that local communities face. These challenges include having a limited influence in governing corporate pollution as corporate environmental externalities often exist across a community’s boundaries. Local communities also experience challenges in effectively organizing sustainability pressures as rapid migration can change a community’s characteristics. Based on a novel database that merges different sets of data covering the populations of American manufacturing facilities, I find that the selective focus of both informal community pressures and formal regulatory pressures are limited in generating more desirable sustainability outcomes when comprehensively evaluated. In addition, a less cohesive community (due to changes in demographics) experiences greater challenges when attempting to organize against corporate pollution. This dissertation’s findings highlight two distinct dynamics that have been under-explored: (1) interactions among different pollutions; and (2) interactions with competing social issues, such as immigration.