Firms with a reputation as socially responsible may have an important cost advantage: If workers prefer their employer to be socially responsible, equilibrium wages may be lower in such firms. We explore this hypothesis, combining Norwegian register data with data on firm reputation collected by...

It has often been claimed that firms’ compliance to environmental regulations is higher than predicted by standard theory, a result labeled the “Harrington paradox” in the literature. Enforcement data from Norway presented here appears, at first glance, to confirm this “stylized fact”:...

If pollution is observable, but some emissions cannot be verified by court,voluntary agreements between a regulator and an industry may bewelfare-improving compared to second-best emission taxes. Such agreementsdiffer from direct regulation in a non-trivial way. The first-best optimummay be...