This article studies the effects of informal, non-monetary sanctions, such as warnings, which are often used as an enforcement instrument by environmental inspection agencies. In cases of uncertainty with respect to the measured emissions due to measurement errors or accidental violations, some...

We consider an environmental inspection agency who credibly commits to a permanent observation of ambient pollution at the property line of individual firms. In this setting, standard results in the theory of repeated games generalize to enforcement games. The inspection agency obtains partial...

We investigate the influence of a judge’s objective function on the type of sanctions used for enforcing environmental standards. We focus on the difference between monetary and non-monetary penalties. Therefore, we examine the extent to which judges take social costs of sanctions into account...

Over time, inspection agencies gather information about firms that cause harmful externalities. This information may allow agencies to differentiate their monitoring strategies in the future, since inspections can be influenced by firms' past performance relative to other competitors in the...

This paper extends a previous analysis by Franckx (2001). We consider an inspection game between n polluting firms and an environmental enforcement agency. If the cost of monitoring ambient pollution is low enough, the optimal inspection policy consists in, on the one hand, imposing the maximal...

We consider the determination of the optimal fine for noncompliance by a legislator who anticipates the inspection game between an autonomous inspection agency and polluting firms. This agency can make the inspection of individual firms contingent on ambient pollution. The agency's autonomy...

Governments may be hindered in setting taxes on markets in which the consumer can choose to consume the good but not pay the tax. An example is urban on-street parking. If government attempts to ration demand to supply via a peak-load fee, but fails to invest in costly enforcement, drivers park...

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...

Using the case study of water pollution in the Flemish textile industry, we discuss three empirical questions concerning the use of emission standards. We find that the Becker result ("maximal fine / minimal inspection") does not hold if we include rule making, implementation and enforcement...

We consider an inspection game between an arbitrary number of polluting firms and an agency who can choose to monitor ambient pollution. We obtain an equilibrium where all firms comply with the same probability and where the inspection agency inspects all firms individually if ambient pollution...