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...

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 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 aim to integrate information, monitoring and enforcement costs into the choice of environmental policy instruments. We use a static partial equilibrium framework to study different combinations of regulatory instruments (taxes, standards...) and enforcement instruments (criminal fine,...

This paper clarifies an issue in the Hirshleifer and Rasmusen-Tsebelis controversy on the effects of penalties on crime: what is the effect of penalties if the transgression of law has a discrete nature and if the law enforcer cannot act as Stackelberg leader? We differentiate between technical...

We show that, under plausible hypotheses, an enforcement agency without commitment power will not undertake any enforcement effort at all in a static game. Indeed, punishment of noncompliant agents brings no social benefits in itself. In a dynamic framework, however, the enforcement agency might...

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...

In this paper we study the taxation of car ownership, car use and public transport in the presence of externalities within the framework of a discrete/continuous choice model. We first derive optimal taxes in a simplified setting, emphasizing the specific role of fixed car ownership taxes and...

We consider a congestible static traffic network which is used by different households and analyse the conditions for optimal congestion taxes on network links, when not all links in the network can be taxed (partial network pricing). This is done under two assumptions about the toll revenues....

The purpose of this paper is to study tax competition on a parallel road network when different governments have tolling authority on the different links of the network. Reflecting many current situations in Europe, each link is used by both local and transit traffic; moreover, transit has a...