We identify and analyse several dynamic implications of setting environmental standards such as to ‘balance’ marginal costs and benefits. The adoption of such a regulatory approach is shown to effect (i) the speed of improvement of abatement technologies; (ii) the ‘direction’ (in a sense...

If a firm can influence its monitorability vis-à-vis an environmental regulator, it is shown that increasing the thoroughness of inspections induces the firm to substitute towards more transparent technologies, whilst increasing their frequency may cause substitution the other way. Perversely,...

In the context of many environmental hazards there is scope for self-defence by victims. Multiple equilibria arise in a model of bilateral precaution under a regime of strict but incompletely enforced environmental liability. This means that the same system of environmental law instigated in two...

Michael Porter, the influential Harvard management guru, has promoted the idea that compliance with stricter environmental regulations can afford ‘secondary’ benefits to firms through improved product design, innovation, corporate morale and in other ways. Once these secondary benefits are...

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...