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...

Minimum standards set by a ‘World Environmental Organisation’ (WEO) and NGO labelling are promoted as alternative approaches to international environmental protection. We explore the potential inter-play between these two approaches when the WEO is subject to pressure from producers. We find...

We offer an alternative to the conventional 'exchange of favours' story for participation in environmental VA's. The model has a variety of unconventional implications and whilst the environmental application is topical it could be used to explain pro-social behaviour in settings as diverse as...

The celebrated ecological economist Herman Daly asked "Is there no a neglected connection between the environment and the macroeconomics we teach? If there is no such thing as environmental macro in our textbooks, should there be? If so what should it look like?". Emphasising the need to breach...

Given the longstanding shortage of nurses in many jurisdictions, why couldn’t nursing wages be raised to attract more people into the profession? We tell a story in which the status of nursing as a ‘vocation’ implies that increasing wages reduces the average quality of applicants...

We present a simple, positive model in which regulatory enforcement is a 2-stage process. In the first stage firms are subject to random inspection. The inspection yields a noisy signal of the firm's true performance. Only if the signal exceeds some critical or "trigger" value is the firm...

The Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) is being adopted for systematic use in cost-benefit analysis (CBA) conducted by the Government of Canada. Although there are potential efficiency gains from its application, we argue that the SCC may be inappropriate for use in CBA for three reasons. First, as...

The desire to avoid rousing community hostility may encourage firms to behave in an environmentally responsible manner. Firms may engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) to maintain community support and/or to regain the support of a community where it has been lost. It has been...

Emotions are a significant determinant of consumer behavior. A customer may get angry if he feels that he is being treated unfairly by his supplier and that anger may make him more likely to switch to an alternative provider. We model the strategic interaction between firms that choose quality...

The extent to which environmental regulatory institutions are either 'green' or 'brown' impacts not just the intensity of regulation at any moment, but also the incentives for the development of new pollution-control technologies. We set up a strategic model of R&D in which a polluter can deploy...