Theoretical analyses of international environmental agreements (IEAs) have typically employed the concept of self-enforcing agreements to predict the number of parties to such an agreement. The term self-enforcing, however, is a bit misleading. The concept refers to the stability of cooperative...

This paper uses laboratory experiments to test the theoretical observations that both the violations of competitive risk-neutral firms and the marginal effectiveness of increased enforcement across firms are independent of differences in their abatement costs and their initial allocations of...

Since firms in an emissions trading program are linked together through a permit market, so too are their compliance choices. Thus, enforcement strategies for trading programs must account for not only the direct effects of enforcement on compliance and emissions decisions, but also the indirect...

While there is a substantial body of economic theory about compliance and enforcement in emissions trading programs, and readily available information about how existing emissions trading programs are enforced, there are no empirical analyses of the determinants of compliance decisions in...

We explore the effects of recommended play and the presentation of payoff information on behavior in an ambient-based policy instrument experiment. Specifically, we test the effects of recommended play (via a description of marginal decision making) and a payoff table on the behavior of...

Water quality trading schemes in the United States can predominantly be characterized by low trading volumes. In this paper we utilize laboratory economics experiments to explore the extent to which the technology through which pollution abatement is achieved influences market outcomes....

Conventional wisdom among environmental economists is that the relative slopes of the marginal social benefit and marginal social cost functions determine whether a price-based or quantity-based environmental regulation leads to higher expected social welfare. We revisit the choice between...

In this paper we examine the impacts of transaction costs on enforcing a transferable emissions permit system. We derive an enforcement strategy with a self-reporting requirement that achieves complete compliance in a cost-effective manner. In the absence of transaction costs targeted...

This paper examines the effects of risk aversion on compliance choices in markets for pollution control. A firm's decision to be compliant or not is independent of its manager's risk preference. However, noncompliant firms with risk averse managers will have lower violations than otherwise...

This paper addresses the following question: To achieve a fixed aggregate emissions target cost-effectively, should emissions trading programs be designed and implemented to achieve full compliance, or does allowing a certain amount of noncompliance reduce the costs of reaching the emissions...