Restrictions preventing regulators from setting standards on a firm by firm basis are commonly assumed to be inefficient. Existing rationales for their prevalence have been politico-economic. We provide an efficiency interpretation. We characterise settings in which the requirement that firms be...

Minimum standards set by a ‘World Environmental Organisation’ (WEO) and NGO labelling are promoted as alternative approaches to international environmental protection. We explore the potential inter-play between these two approaches when the WEO is subject to pressure from producers. We find...

We offer an alternative to the conventional 'exchange of favours' story for participation in environmental VA's. The model has a variety of unconventional implications and whilst the environmental application is topical it could be used to explain pro-social behaviour in settings as diverse as...

The celebrated ecological economist Herman Daly asked "Is there no a neglected connection between the environment and the macroeconomics we teach? If there is no such thing as environmental macro in our textbooks, should there be? If so what should it look like?". Emphasising the need to breach...

Given the longstanding shortage of nurses in many jurisdictions, why couldn’t nursing wages be raised to attract more people into the profession? We tell a story in which the status of nursing as a ‘vocation’ implies that increasing wages reduces the average quality of applicants...

Firms and environmental NGO's contest regulatory, legal and other Decisions in a variety of fora including law courts, administrative tribunals and the media. Environmental advocacy in the 1990's is big business, yet its organisation has been little studied. How can NGO's with differing...

Regulators often go on to lucrative careers either working for, or selling advice to, the industry they previously policed. We investigate the implications of this phenomenon for the design of regulatory institutions. The policy response of cooling-off periods (as used in the UK, US, France and...

It is often taken for granted that if more firms were innately honest or ethical in the way they behaved, this would be a good thing. In this paper we use the example of environmental regulation to show that such a claim cannot, in general, be sustained. If regulation is by pollution tax we show...