We find that air pollution increases crime in a city that ranks in the worst two percentiles worldwide for dirty winter air. Our identification strategy employs distinct geographic features of Almaty, Kazakhstan: cleaner mountain winds and frequent temperature inversions. Using these variables...

How do firms' efforts to prevent harm to third parties change as they approach, enter, and then exit bankruptcy? To help answer this, I investigate a panel of roughly 350 US firms, all of which declare bankruptcy and are regulated under the Clean Water Act (CWA) for pollutants they release into...

Utilizing 1.5 million court judgment files in China during 2015–2018, we investigate the causal relationship between short-term air pollution exposure and crime rates in the context of the developing world. Using thermal inversion as the instrument for air pollution, we find that a 10 µg/m3...

Economists generally view environmental enforcement as a tool to secure compliance with regulations. This paper demonstrates that credible enforcement significantly increases statutory overcompliance with regulations as well. We find that many plants with discharges typically below legally...

Past interest in the phenomena of Public interest litigation has concentrated on a legal justification of PIL and on arguments based on “access to Justice” for the poor. There seems to be scant literature that looks at PIL from a Law and Economics perspective. This paper sets up a framework...

Economists generally view environmental enforcement as a tool to secure compliance with regulations. This paper demonstrates that credible enforcement significantly increases statutory over-compliance with regulations as well. We find that many plants with discharges typically below legally...

This paper addresses the issue of whether the powers of monitoring compliance and allocating tradeable emissions allowances within a federation of countries should be appointed to a unique federal regulator or decentralized to several local regulators. To this end, we develop a two stage game...

Recent evidence suggests a positive impact of air pollution on crime in large cities. We provide first evidence on the potential effect of air pollution on criminal activity using a broader set of geographical regions with lower air pollution levels. We use a unique combination of daily crime...

This article exploit a data base of 1.522 observations related to Lombardy's municipalities to run a cross sectional estimation of the drivers of MW selection. We find no evidence of a significant correlation between the percentage of selected MW selection and market variables such as the unit...

The Europe 2020 Strategy has identified the key goal of smart, more inclusive and sustainable growth. In this direction, redirecting firms’ innovation activities towards ecological targets without hampering their competitiveness is of paramount importance. The double externality issue related...