In this paper, we provide an analysis of the water sector in France. Together with a description of the specificities of water delivery and the collection and treatment of waste waters, we highlight three crucial points to understand "the French water school"": the organization of the sector,...

Many network industries (telecommunications, electricity, natural gas, postal services, water and sewage services, etc.) are confronted with significant logistic and behavioral problems in their transition towards competition. In this article, I first recall some general principes and...

This paper explores the effects of effluent regulatory activity on firm behavior in the pulp and paper industry in Ontario. The model uses instrumental variables to attempt to distinguish between that correlation between emission limits and emissions coming from regulatory capture and that...

This paper examines how different rules for presentation of evidence affect verdicts in regulatory hearings and the welfare and efficiency properties these procedures exhibit. The hearing is modeled as a game of imperfect information in which the respondent is privately informed about validity...

In this article, we highlight the factors which influence governments in their decision to implement environmental policies of varying degrees of severity. We substantiate our arguments with analytical evidence from public interest theory and the economic theory of regulation (interest group...

Economists have greatly criticized regulations that impose uniform environmental standards on plants which may differ in terms both of their marginal abatement cost and marginal damage functions. Such a critic ignores however that the implementation of the standards may vary significantly across...

An increasing number of regulators have adopted public disclosure programs to create incentives for pollution control. In this paper, we study the impact of British Columbia's list of polluters whereby the province's environmental regulator reveals the name of plants which are either not...

It is now well recognized that all types of regulation are imposing costs on our society. The studies which have tried to evaluate these costs are numerous and their methologies are diversified. This paper is proposing a critical analysis of these methodologies and of the results obtained by...

It has been observed that upon trading-off the costs and benefits of pollution control, profit-maximizing firms may choose not to invest their resources in pollution abatement since the expected penalty imposed by regulators falls considerably short of the investment costs. Regulators have...

We focus in this paper on the effects of court errors on the optimal sharing of liability between firms and financiers, as an environmental policy instrument. Using a structural model of the interactions between firms, financial institutions, governments and courts we show, through numerical...