Researchers have utilized the fact that many states have term limits (as opposed to being eligible for re-election) for governors to determine how changes in electoral incentives alter state regulatory agency behavior. This paper asks whether these impacts spill over into private sector...

In the search for effective pesticide risk management tools, the design of pesticide risk indicators is nowadays receiving increasing attention as a complement to more established regulatory strategies. In the present paper, we apply some recently developed pesticide risk indices and test their...

This study addresses the achievements of cooperative agreements in sustainable agriculture policy. After an economic analysis of multi-actor choice situations, it focuses the attention on the self-organizing potential of regional market parties in order to comply with environmental policy...

Consider a group of agents located along a polluted river where every agent must pay a certain cost for cleaning up the polluted river. Following the model of Ni and Wang (2007), we propose the class of α-Local Responsibility Sharing methods, which generalizes the Local Responsibility Sharing...

This paper presents the first empirical test of the green paradox hypothesis, according to which well-intended but imperfectly implemented policies may lead to detrimental environmental outcomes due to supply side responses. We use the introduction of the Acid Rain Program in the U.S. as a case...

We study how the shadow economy affects pollution and how this effect depends on corruption levels in public administration. Production in the shadow economy allows firms to avoid environmental regulation policies; a large informal sector may be accompanied by higher pollution levels. Our...

A well-known result about market power in emission permit markets is that efficiency can be achieved by full free allocation to the dominant firm. I show that this result breaks down when taking the interaction between input and output markets into account, even if the firm perceives market...

High transaction costs and thin participation plague water quality trading and prevent markets from delivering expected efficiency gains. Point sources generate a single pollutant, while nonpoint sources generate multiple, complementary pollutants. We develop a dynamic search model of...

Consider a situation in which countries anticipate an international environmental agreement (IEA) to be in effect sometime in the future. What is the impact of the future IEA on current emissions after its announcement? We show that the answer to this question is ambiguous. We examine four types...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) maintains networks of pollution monitors for two basic purposes: to check and enforce the attainment of national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) and to provide useful data for studying pollution and its effects. These purposes imply...