Timing of environmental inspections: Survival of the compliant1

Environmental inspection agencies have limited resources. A natural response to this shortage of resources is targeting. The agency will inspect the firms it suspects to be noncompliant. This targeting policy leads to higher compliance than random inspections. This paper uses individual inspection data on the timing policy of the environmental agency. We focus on the probability that firms in the textile industry in Flanders (Belgium) will be inspected by the environmental inspection agency at a particular moment in time given that the firm was not inspected for t periods prior to that moment. We use a survival model to show that the environmental agency inspects firms in a nonrandom way and investigate the factors that influence the probability of inspection.