Voluntary Agreements and Private Enforcement of Environmental Regulation
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper focuses on a type of voluntary pollution abatement agreement (VA) in which the regulator offers regulatory relief for the participating firm in exchange for environmental improvements. If the regulator does not have statutory authority to provide regulatory relief, the VA can leave the firm more vulnerable to legal challenges through citizen lawsuits. I use a model of negotiated VAs to examine the impact of citizen enforcement on the likelihood of an agreement and on the outcome of a VA. The results indicate that both the probabilities of enforcement by the regulatory agency and of private enforcement through a citizen lawsuit affect the likelihood of a VA and the level of abatement when an agreement is reached. A VA can result in higher abatement and net social benefits than regulation if the probability of private enforcement and accompanying costs are high and the probability of agency enforcement is low.
منابع مشابه
Enforcing compliance with international environmental agreements using a deposit-refund system
Whether nations are able to cooperatively manage shared resources through international environmental agreements (IEAs) depends on whether compliance with voluntary commitments can be enforced. Given that nations are sovereign enforcing compliance with IEAs cannot rely on the presence of a strong sanctioning body. Nonetheless, enforcement provisions must be effective in the sense that they will...
متن کاملWho Enforces Enforcement?: Can Public Prosecutors in Brazil Break the Endless Regress?
Enforcement is one of the greatest challenges in environmental policy-making. Even when policies are well-designed theoretically, they will not deliver the intended effects if the difficulties of enforcement are not explicitly incorporated in their design. Much of the rationale for the use of economic instruments is an attempt to economize on the informational requirements of policies and reduc...
متن کاملBreaking the Deadlock – Voluntary Agreements and Regulatory Measures in German Waste Management
Based on three German case studies in the field of waste management, the paper argues that the use of voluntary agreements does not necessarily conflict with the use of traditional command-and-control regulation within the same issue area as it is often suggested in the public and political science debate. The case studies – the voluntary agreement on the collection and recovery of spent batter...
متن کاملFirms, Courts, and Reputation Mechanisms: towards a Positive Theory of Private Ordering
This Essay formulates a positive model that predicts when commercial parties will employ private ordering to enforce their agreements. The typical enforcement mechanism associated with private ordering is the reputation mechanism, in which a merchant community punishes parties in breach of contract by denying them future business. The growing private ordering literature argues that these privat...
متن کاملSelf-Regulation, Taxation and Public Voluntary Environmental Agreements
An increasingly popular instrument for solving environmental problems is the “public voluntary agreement (VA),” in which government o¤ers technical assistance and positive publicity to ...rms that reach certain environmental goals. Prior papers treat such agreements as a superior, low-cost instrument that can be used to preempt a threat of traditional, ine¢cient, regulation. We present a more g...
متن کامل