For years, economists and lawyers have bemoaned the inefficiencies of the current centralized, command-and-control regime of environmental regulation. Despite the manifest failure of the current regime, however, the system of environmental regulation seems to be largely immune to rationalization...

Issues relating to the interaction of trade and the environment are a major international policy concern. They are likely to be a focal point during the next round of trade negotiations within the WTO. Free trade advocates contend that trade liberalization makes countries richer and as a result...

Recent studies find that environmental tax swaps typically exacerbate the costs of the tax system and therefore do not produce a "double dividend". We extend previous models by incorporating tax-favored consumption goods (e.g. housing, medical care). The efficiency gains from recycling...

We study how the opportunity to trade in trash might influence the equilibrium outcome when the tax on the externality is determined by a political economy process. In our model, individuals have heterogeneous preferences for environmental quality, and there is a leakage when funds are...

We analyze the conditions under which a legal intervention can be compared to a regulatory framework in the context of a political economy model of environmental policy. The first part of the paper describes the characteristics of the different instruments we want to compare: first, an...

We address in this paper the problem of comparing and choosing among different policy instruments to implement the incentive objective of an efficient deterrence of environmental degradation and the remedy objective of an efficient clean-up of damages and a proper compensation of victims. Two...