Environmental regulators often use environmental policy to induce green investment by firms. However, if an environmental policy fails to exert a long-run effect on regulating the economic agents' behavior, it may be more reasonable to think of the firm as the leader in the game, since the investment in green technology is usually a strategic decision. In this paper, we consider a three-stage S...

The Regulatory Policy Program at the Center for Business and Government provides an environment in which to develop and test leading ideas on regulation and regulatory institutions. RPP's research aims to improve the global society and economy by understanding the impacts of regulation and creating better decisions about the design and implementation of regulatory strategies around the world. R...

In 1992, with the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro and the subsequent Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the world changed for the science of taxonomy. Many taxonomists appear not to have noticed this change, but it has significantly altered the political climate in which taxonomic research is undertaken. By the late 1990s it was clear that effec...

Several papers have explored the effect of tighter environmental standards on environmental innovation. While mandatory regulation remains the central tenet of US environmental policy, the regulatory landscape has changed since the early 1990s with the increased recourse by federal and state agencies to corporate environmentalism--voluntary pollution prevention (P2) by firms--to achieve environ...

Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in the research literature regarding how environmental practices (EPs) can improve firm performance. According to Rondinelli and Vastag (1995), firms may have been reacting to an increasingly difficult regulatory environment or responding to market pressure. Either way, the responses of firms to environmental pressures has led to practices that ...

In this paper we examine an alternative policy scenario, where governments allow polluting …rms to trade permits in a strategic environmental policy model. We demonstrate, among other things, that with no market power in the permits market, governments of the exporting …rms do not have an incentive to under-regulate pollution in order to become more competitive. This strategic e¤ect is reversed...

The general public and environmental policy makers often perceive management actions of environmental managers as "science," when such actions are, in fact, value judgments about when to intervene in natural processes. The choice of action requires ethical as well as scientific analysis because managers must choose a normative outcome to direct their intervention. I examine a management case st...

We consider panacea formation in the framework of adaptive learning and decision for social-ecological systems (SESs). Institutions for managing such systems must address multiple timescales of ecological change, as well as features of the social community in which the ecosystem policy problem is embedded. Response of the SES to each candidate institution must be modeled and treated as a stocha...

Even when environmental data quantify the risks and benefits of delayed responses to rapid anthropogenic change, institutions rarely respond promptly. We propose that narratives complementing environmental datasets can motivate responsive environmental policy. To explore this idea, we relate a case study in which a narrative of economic loss due to regionally rapid ocean acidification-an anthro...

Pesticides pose serious threats to both human health and the environment. In Europe, farmers are encouraged to reduce their use, and in France a recent environmental policy fixed a target of halving the pesticide use by 2018. Organic and integrated cropping systems have been proposed as possible solutions for reducing pesticide use, but the effect of reducing pesticide use on crop yield remains...