This paper makes some steps toward a formal political economy of environmental policy. Economists' quasi-unanimous preferences for sophisticated incentive regulation is reconsidered. First, we recast the question of instrument choice in the general mechanism literature and provide an incomplete...

Jaffe and Palmer (1997) present three distinct variants of the so-called Porter Hypothesis. The weak version of the hypothesis posits that environmental regulation will stimulate certain kinds of environmental innovations. The narrow version of the hypothesis asserts that flexible environmental...

We analyze the conditions under which a legal intervention can be compared to a regulatory framework in the context of a political economy model of environmental policy. The first part of the paper describes the characteristics of the different instruments we want to compare: first, an...

We address in this paper the problem of comparing and choosing among different policy instruments to implement the incentive objective of an efficient deterrence of environmental degradation and the remedy objective of an efficient clean-up of damages and a proper compensation of victims. Two...

We focus in this paper on the effects of court errors on the optimal sharing of liability between firms and financiers, as an environmental policy instrument. Using a structural model of the interactions between firms, financial institutions, governments and courts we show, through numerical...