The paper examines the incentives that affect public water systems' decisions to notify the public of contamination incidents. A unique dataset on the public notification (PN) of maximum contamination level violations is used to analyze the determinants of, and the impact of regulatory change...

I show that British electricity tariffs create substantial welfare loss, equivalent to between six and eighteen percent of domestic consumption value. Losses are greater than unpriced distributional and environmental counter effects. Expected technological change will increase this welfare loss....

Every summer, a dead zone is created in the Chesapeake Bay. The dead zone is created by too much of a good thing: nutrients, especially nitrogen and phosphorus. The largest source of excess nutrients in the Chesapeake is agriculture; manure and artificial fertilizers are washed into streams that...

We estimate the welfare implications of a cost-reflective 'Coasian' reform of electricity network tariffs using an Irish case study. We find that current Distribution Use of System (DUoS) tariffs deviate considerably from a cost-reflective structure. At the individual level, tariff reform leads...

Several pollution control regimes, including climate change policies, allow polluters in one sector subject to an emissions cap to offset excessive emissions in that sector with pollution abatement in another sector. The government may often find it more costly to verify offset claims than to...

Illegal waste disposal is one of the most important environmental problems worldwide. An increasing number of countries apply criminal sanctioning to environmental offenders, based on the notion, but without any evidence that such sanctions provide deterrence. The present paper studies the...

At the same time that the world was rocked by climate-related unnatural disasters, the social unrest sparked by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin forced a long-overdue racial reckoning with regard to over-policing, mass incarceration, and other...

Asthma is a non-communicable and non-curable lung disease that is associated with an array of environmental contaminants and chemicals. Many of these hazards are subject to regulation, or may be considered for regulation, in order to reduce exposures and prevent human health risks. However, the...

In "The Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Hardin argues that those who can use a resource for free consume more of it than they would if they had to pay for it. Public resources eventually collapse because people overuse them. Hardin’s widely accepted argument seems correct as far as it goes,...

This study examines the effect of a pollution liability insurance mandate on corporate environmental compliance in Shenzhen, China. We employ a triple differences design, comparing electroplating and circuit board manufacturing firms, mandated to purchase insurance, to industries and a...