Environmental Policy, Public Interest and Political Market

Political Choice, Public Policy, and Distributional Outcomes

Market-based Environmental Policy Instruments

Reconsidering the choice of market based environmental policy instruments: rent creation and political influence

The establishment of new environmental regulation, such as emissions taxes and tradable pollution permit markets, create rents that can be captured through a process of socially wasteful rent seeking. In this paper, we create a framework that compares social welfare under alternative market-based environmental policy instruments when agents lobby for the contestable rent. We show revenue raisin...

Conflicts of Interest in Public Policy Research

In this essay, I discuss the difficulty of sustaining an inquisitorial system of policy research and analysis when it is embedded in a broader adversarial political setting. Conflicts of interest in public policy research exist on a continuum from blatant pecuniary bias to more subtle ideological bias. Because these biases are only partially susceptible to correction through individual effort a...

The Political Economy of Environmental Policy

This paper provides a review and assessment of the extensive literature on the political determination of environmental regulation. A promising theoretical literature has emerged relatively recently that provides models of the political interaction of government with various interest groups in the setting of environmental standards and the choice of regulatory instruments. A large empirical lit...