We consider environmental regulation of n risk-averse, multiple pollutant firms. We develop a “yardstick competition” scheme where the regulatory scheme depends on the dierence between a firm’s “aggregate” performance and the average “aggregate” performance of the industry. Whether...

According to Porter’s hypothesis, environmental regulation increases the regulated firms’ profits. However, if a “greener” strategy is more profitable why does it need regulatory intervention in order to be implemented? Let a greener product increase the adopter’s marginal cost while...

Environmental inspection agencies have limited resources. A natural response to this shortage of resources is targeting and this targeting policy leads to higher compliance than random inspections. This paper uses individual inspection data on the inspection policy of the environmental agency...

Environmental policies frequently target the ratio of dirty to green output within the same industry. To achieve such targets, the green sector may be subsidized or the dirty sector be taxed. We show that in a monopolistic competition setting, the two policy approaches have different welfare...

In recent years, structural changes in the hog sector, including increasing farm size and regional shifts in production, have altered manure management practices. Over the same period, changes to the Clean Water Act, new state regulations, and increasing local conflicts over odor have influenced...

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...

In this paper, we study a firm’s optimal lobby behavior and its effect on investment in pollution abatement capital. We develop a dynamic framework where a representative firm can invest in both abatement and lobby capital in response to a possible future increase in pollution tax. We show...

Approximately $30 billion (2000$) has been spent on Superfund clean-ups of hazardous waste sites, and remediation efforts are incomplete at roughly half of the 1,500 Superfund sites. This study estimates the effect of Superfund clean-ups on local housing price appreciation. We compare housing...

This thesis consists of five papers, four of them basically concerning environmental issues, while the fifth paper addresses the issue of measuring output from the educational sector. <p> The first paper starts from the fact that industrial activity causes environmental damage. Therefore, public...</p>

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a procedure to empirically test the Porter hypothesis. This hypothesis argues that environmental regulation not only increases environmental quality, but also brings the polluting producers information that makes them more resource efficient, as well as...