Many environmental regulations impose limits on harmful activities but include discretionary
“safety valve” provisions allowing the regulator to grant exemptions that provide relief to …

When governments regulate externalities, they inevitably create, modify or reassign property
rights. Although these rights have important distributional implications, they are rarely at the …

Critics of environmental laws based on emission standards that are uniform for all emitters in
broad industry classes focus on cost. Economists favor emission charges or other incentive …

Environmental economists and policymakers often advocate market-based environmental
regulatory regimes. While market-based regimes may be structured as Pigouvian taxes …

This chapter provides an economic perspective of environmental law and policy with regard
to both normative and positive dimensions. It begins with an examination of the central …

We study market-based instruments under incomplete participation. Incomplete participation
means that the regulation does not cover all emitters that contribute to harmful damages. Our …

We investigate how moral concerns about permit trading affect an endogenous pollution
permit trading equilibrium, where governments choose non-cooperatively the amount of …

This paper shows possible inconsistencies in environmental law, in which regulatory impact
assessment (RIA) and the polluter pays principle (PPP) coexist. While these norms can be …

I analyze different approaches for protecting the environment when stakeholders are
privately informed about the costs and benefits of pollution reduction. The presence of …

Some eighty years ago, economists first proposed the use of corrective taxes to internalize
environmental and other externalities. Fifty years, later, the portfolio of potential …