Most of the theoretical literature on enforcing environmental policies focuses on situations in which pollution sources are noncompliant. However, some recent work suggests that these situations will very often involve suboptimal policy designs. Thus, the circumstances under which it is...

We study the impact of bankruptcy risk on markets for tradable environmental and natural resource permits. We find that firms that risk bankruptcy demand more permits than if they were financially secure. Consequently, bankruptcy risk in a competitive market for tradable property rights causes...

Although the theoretical literature on the performance of voluntary approaches to environmental protection has progressed quite far in the last decade, no one has rigorously addressed the obvious point that even voluntary emissions control policies must be enforced. This paper examines the...

Under favorable but reasonable conditions, an imperfectly enforced emissions tax produces the efficient allocation of individual emissions control; aggregate emissions are independent of whether enforcement of the tax is sufficient to induce the full compliance of firms, and differences in...

This paper examines the endogenous formation of coalitions that provide public goods in which players implement a minimum participation requirement before deciding whether to join. We demonstrate theoretically that payoff-maximizing players will vote to implement efficient participation...

This paper presents the results from a series of framed field experiments conducted in fishing communities off the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The goal is to investigate the relative effectiveness of exogenous regulatory pressure and pro-social emotions in promoting cooperative behavior in a...

This paper considers the optimal design of an emissions trading program that includes a safety valve tax that allows pollution sources to escape the emissions cap imposed by the aggregate supply of emissions permits. I demonstrate that an optimal hybrid emissions trading/emissions tax policy...

Two important features of agricultural quarantine inspections of shipping containers for invasive species at U.S. ports of entry are the general absence of economic considerations and the severe uncertainty that surrounds invasive species introductions. In this article, we propose and illustrate...

In contrast with what we perceive is the conventional wisdom about setting emissions taxes under uncertainty, we demonstrate that setting a uniform tax equal to expected marginal damage is not generally efficient under incomplete information about firms' abatement costs and damages from...