This paper discusses the influence of public ownership on trade policy instruments. We demonstrate three important invariance results. First, the degree of public ownership affects neither the level of socially optimal activities nor welfare if the government chooses optimal trade policy...

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...

Twenty years ago, Harvard Business School economist and strategy professor Michael Porter stood conventional wisdom about the impact of environmental regulation on business on its head by declaring that well designed regulation could actually enhance competitiveness. The traditional view of...

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...

It is generally recognized that firms face both internal and external pressure to improve their environmental performance. However, few studies have attempted to delineate the importance of those various sources of pressure as firms' managers themselves perceive them. In this study, we show that...

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...

The conventional wisdom about environmental protection is that it comes at an additional cost on farmers imposed by the government, which may erode their global competitiveness. However, during the last decade, this paradigm has been challenged by a number of analysts. In particular, Porter...

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...