This paper reviews the economic justification for voluntary environmental programs to derive defensible measures of their positive social outcomes. We consider ideal experimental and statistical designs to detect and attribute benefits. We also explore a set of more practical approaches to...

Voluntary approaches have become a popular in the U.S. to enhance the efficacy and scope of existing regulations and to reduce emissions in sectors or for pollutants where formal environmental regulation is lacking. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of a particular EPA voluntary...

Self-regulation programs, in which industry associations set membership codes beyond government regulations, are prevalent despite scarce evidence on their effectiveness. We examine Responsible Care (RC) in the US chemical manufacturing sub-sector, whose membership codes include pollution...

Policy makers around the world seem to have widely endorsed the use of voluntary approaches as a means to address concerns about environmental protection and resource degradation. Voluntary approaches have been adopted in many developed countries, as well as in a number of developing countries....