A major trend in the regulation of industrial risks to human health and the environment is the provision of relevant information to (and the empowerment of) all stakeholders and risk bearers. This paper provides a concrete look at one of the key items in implementing this "regulation by...

This paper considers the information systems induced by auditing policies in a principal-agent model with moral hazard. We point out that two such information systems A and B are seldom comparable using the customary mean-preserving spread relation between their respective likelihood ratio...

In the United States and most industrialized countries, regulatory policies and decision-making pertaining to food safety, occupational health and environmental protection are science-based. The actual pace and complexity of technological innovation, however, make it increasingly necessary to...

The regulation of environmental risks increasingly emphasizes the awareness and empowerment of stakeholders. The success of this approach, however, seems to depend crucially on the quality of environmental disclosures. In this paper we investigate the amount and quality of the information that...

Pollution abatement goods and services are now largely being delivered by a specialized "eco-industry."" This note reconsiders Pigouvian taxes in this context. We find that the optimal emission tax will depart from the marginal social cost of pollution according to the polluters' and the...

A large number of our daily activities are routinized in the sense that they are done without explicit deliberation. We provide a first model that captures this phenomenon. In a dynamic setting routines arise endogenously from the necessity to economize on time and attention. Routines are shown...

This chapter considers three matters that business firms whose activities can be dangerous for human health and the environment increasingly have to deal with: public disclosure of all health and environmental risks, direct involvement of stakeholders in the management of operations, and...

The Porter Hypothesis says that well-designed environmental regulation should trigger innovations and enhance the competitiveness of firms. This paper, which follows the invitation to participate at a recent workshop financed by the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, summarizes...

We analyze the sources of persistent asymmetry between firms and between markets in a given industry. We focus on the case where some exogenous ex ante cost asymmetry can be magnified ex post in terms of cost (capabilities), market shares, prices and profit. Our model - a two-product Cournot...

This paper re-examines environmental regulation, under the assumption that pollution abatement technologies and services are provided by an imperfectly competitive environment industry. It is shown that each regulatory instrument (emission taxes and quotas; design standards; and voluntary...