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Environmental policies and impacts in the western United States: state-level effects of anti-ESG policies, agricultural risk management, and market-oriented solutions for groundwater governance
Allen, Jonah James
Allen, Jonah James
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2025
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This thesis investigates how environmental policies—both those intended to promote sustainability and those seeking to shield industry from climate-aligned finance—affect resource management and producer behavior in the Western United States. The first study examines the effectiveness of Texas’s anti-Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) policy using a difference-in-regression-discontinuity design that compares oil and gas (O&G) drilling activity across the Texas–New Mexico Permian Basin border. The analysis finds no significant effect on new drilling, suggesting that the policy failed to alter lending behavior or investment in O&G, raising questions about the broader efficacy of anti-ESG legislation in protecting targeted industries. The second explores how irrigators respond to future water shortage risks stemming from both climate and policy in two groundwater-dependent agricultural regions: northwestern Kansas and southern Colorado. Based on a discrete choice experiment with 1,525 producers, the study finds suggestive evidence that policy-driven risks are more salient than climatic ones, and that producers prefer adapting through technology over crop changes, though responses vary by operation size, income, and water access. The third study analyzes how local governance institutions manage groundwater scarcity through collective action by comparing distinct policy designs in Kansas and Colorado. Drawing on stakeholder interviews, regional data, and original survey data, the chapter examines how hydrological, economic, and institutional differences led to divergent rulemaking pathways—quotas in Kansas and price-based policies in Colorado—and greater heterogeneity within Colorado’s decentralized management system. It then extends the analysis by testing whether observed regional patterns in policy design and implementation are reflected in individual-level producer preferences and perceptions. The chapter emphasizes the importance of institutional fit, perceived risk, and producer heterogeneity in shaping environmental policy outcomes in resource-constrained settings.
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