Despite ongoing efforts by regulatory authorities, there is significant noncompliance with the EU Nitrates Directive among farms in Ireland. Nutrient pollution harms water quality and ecosystems, and farms are subject to fines for noncompliance. This paper examines reasons for noncompliance and...

States commit to protect citizens' rights through international treaties. With globalization, however, cross-border transactions and transnational relationships have increased the role of non-state actors, in particular corporations. While corporations have indeed transformed the international...

In the basic model of the literature on international environmental agreements (IEAs) (Barrett 1994; Rubio and Ulph 2006) the number of signatories of self-enforcing IEAs does not exceed three, if non-positive emissions are ruled out. We extend that model by introducing a composite consumer good and...

We characterize the optimal policy and policy instruments for self-enforcing treaties when countries invest in green technology before they pollute. If the discount factor is too small to support the first best, then both emissions and investments will be larger than in the first best, when...