Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

There has been a growing trend worldwide to design green and high-performance buildings that can reduce energy and water consumption, enhance resource reuse and recycle, and improve public health of building residents. Governments at different levels have adopted a variety of policy measures to promote green buildings. Studies have generally focused on the impact of municipal-level policies on green building adoption. For instance, Simcoe and Toffel (2014) investigate how municipal green building procurement policies affect private sector adoption of LEED certified buildings. Cidell and Cope (2013) test the correlation between the presence of a municipal green building policy and the number of registered and certified LEED buildings. Choi (2010) examines the impact of municipal regulatory policies and incentive-based policies on green office building designations. However, scarce research has been conducted to compare state adoption and diffusion pattern of green buildings, and to examine how effective state policies have been in overcoming barriers to green building adoption.

To understand why states in the U.S. adopt green buildings at different rates, we construct a panel dataset for 50 states and District of Columbia from 2006 to 2017. We choose to focus on LEED-certified school buildings. Particularly, we are interested in the impact of state building energy efficiency policies on green school building adoptions, and how the policy impact differs between public and private schools. This study hypothesizes that state building energy efficiency policies which generally target publicly owned buildings have promoted green building adoption for public schools, and there are adoption spillovers in private schools.

The dependent variables of this study measure the percentage of green schools in all newly constructed public or private schools in a given year. We obtain LEED certified school information from the Center for Green Schools at US Green Building Council. Data on public and private schools, including name, address and id of newly added schools, are collected from the National Center for Education Statistics. The focal explanatory variable of this study is state green building policy effort, which is operationalized using American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE)’s state building energy efficiency policy scores.We also control for state level education spending, unemployment rate, median household income, government ideology, public environmental awareness, and population change in our analysis. OLS models will be estimated with state and year fixed effects. This paper will provide theoretical contribution about how we understand and explain patterns of green technology adoption in public and private sectors, under the influence of state policies.