This paper reports on a preliminary analysis of performance indicators on 3,020 platforms operating in the Gulf of Mexico between 1996 and 2010. Statistical analysis reveals that company-reported incidents (such as blowouts, fires, injuries, and pollution) increase with water depth, controlling...

This paper reports on an empirical analysis of company-reported incidents on oil and gas production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico between 1996 and 2010. During these years, there was a dramatic increase in the water depths at which offshore oil and gas is extracted. Controlling for platform...

Over the past several years, labeling schemes that focus on a wide range of environmental and social metrics have proliferated. Although little empirical evidence has been generated with respect to carbon footprint labels, much can be learned from our experience with similar product labels. We...

Information disclosure policies represent an additional policy mechanism that can be used to foster reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. These informational efforts could be either mandatory or voluntary, but in each case government regulation could play a productive role by establishing...

Twenty years ago, Harvard Business School economist and strategy professor Michael Porter stood conventional wisdom about the impact of environmental regulation on business on its head by declaring that well-designed regulation could actually enhance competitiveness. The traditional view of...

Hedonic pricing models have been used to infer the cost of crime by estimating property value differences in high versus low crime areas. However, previous studies have been unable to disentangle the cost of individual crimes. This note reports on an attempt to estimate the cost of individual...

The paper provides new insights into the productivity of teams and the relationship between the inspector and the inspected party. Exploiting exogenous variation in the number of inspectors that are sent to offshore oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, we find that adding an inspector...

Some twenty years ago, Harvard Business School economist and strategy professor Michael Porter challenged conventional wisdom about the impact of environmental regulation on business by declaring that well-designed regulation could actually enhance competitiveness. The traditional view of...