In many industries firms affect the environment in two distinct types of ways. Firstly they emit routine, anticipated volumes of “flow pollutants”, secondly they can potentially inflict catastrophic environmental damage, liability for which may be overhanging or limited by the law. Operaters...

In this article some historical and contemporary environmental conflicts are described. The international environmental liability of mining corporations is discussed. Comparisons are made with conflicts in the United States and in South Africa which fall under the rubric of the Environmental...

It has been estimated that the costs of remediating contaminated sites in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) will be very high. These contingent environmental liabilities have emerged precisely at the time CEE countries are attempting to privatize their capital stocks, creating major challenges...

Environmental federalism considers what level of government should optimally regulate pollution. This paper addresses this question for accidental pollution, which government regulates through the ex post liability regimes of either negligence or strict liability. We find that decentralizing the...

In this paper,we examine the stock market reaction to industrial disasters. We consider an original sample of 64 explosions in chemical plants and refineries worldwide over the period 1990-2005. A quarter of the accidents resulted in a toxic release,and half of them caused at least one death or...

This paper addresses the conditions for setting up strict civil liability schemes. For that it compares the social efficiency of two main civil liability regimes usually enforced to protect the environment: the strict liability regime and the “capped strict liability scheme”. First, it shows...

This paper investigates potential motivations for late adopting U.S. companies to begin disclosing environmental liability amounts in their financial statements. Based on a review of 10-K reports filed from 1998 through 2012, inclusive, we identified 55 firms initiating environmental liability...

The identification and treatment of protest response in stated preference (SP) research such as contingent valuation is an underdeveloped area. Protest related to the polluter pays principle (PPP) is expected to pose an important hurdle to the application of SP research in environmental...

The paper proposes a ‘component-based’ approach to guide the choice of the social discount rate in natural resources damage assessment, where time and discounting are key features. It is a multi-rate discounting scheme, which draws on concepts from dual-rate and time-declining approaches....