Public disclosure programs that collect and disseminate information about firms’ environmental performance are increasingly popular in both developed and developing countries. Yet little is known about whether they actually improve environmental performance, particularly in the latter setting....

Voluntary agreements (VAs) negotiated between environmental regulators and industry are increasingly popular. However, little is known about whether they are likely to be effective in developing and transition countries, where local and federal environmental regulatory capacity is typically...

Virtually all U.S. states have now created voluntary cleanup programs (VCPs) offering liability relief and other incentives for responsible parties to remediate contaminated sites. We use a duration model to analyze participation in Oregon’s program. In contrast to previous VCP research, we...

According to proponents, voluntary agreements (VAs) negotiated with polluters sidestep weak institutions and other barriers to conventional environmental regulation in developing countries. Yet little is known about their effectiveness. We examine VAs in Colombia, a global leader in the use of...

This paper estimates the impact on Delhi’s air quality of a number of policy measures recently implemented in the city to curb air pollution using monthly time-series data from 1990 to 2005. The best known of these measures is the court-mandated conversion of all commercial passenger...

Using purpose-collected survey data from 537 households in 60 different villages of the Jhabua district of India, this paper investigates the extent to which rural households depend on common-pool natural resources for their daily livelihood. Previous studies have found that resource...

Households in rural India are highly dependent on firewood as their main source of energy, partly because non-biofuels tend to be expensive. The prevailing view is therefore that, when faced with shortages of firewood in the village commons, such households, and especially the women in them,...

Although there is general public approval of the improvements in Delhi’s air quality in the recent years, the process by which this change was brought about has been criticized. A common perception is that air quality policies were prescribed by the Supreme Court, and not by an institution...

To investigate how fuel economy is valued in the Indian car market, we compute the cost to Indian consumers of purchasing a more fuel-efficient vehicle and compare it to the benefit of lower fuel costs over the life of the vehicle. We use hedonic price functions for four market segments (petrol...

In the early 1990s, hoping to reduce chronic electricity shortages and enhance the efficiency of Chinese power plants, China opened its doors to foreign direct investment (FDI) in electricity generation. Using data from an original survey of US private investors, official Chinese statistics, and...