Do EPA Administrators Recommend Environmental Policies That Citizens Want?

We investigate whether Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator recommendations regarding improvements in environmental quality differ from citizen preferences.

This is done by conducting identical choice experiments on both citizens and administrators at the EPA. The administrators were asked to choose the alternatives they would recommend as a policy, while the citizens were asked to act as private persons. We find that the rankings of attributes differ between the two groups and that the willingness to pay (WTP) obtained from the choices made by the administrators is higher for five out of the seven attributes, and in some cases the difference between the WTPs is substantial.