Environmental self-auditing by private firms is generally thought to both deserve and require encouragement. Firms can audit themselves more cheaply and effectively than can regulators, but too often are deterred for fear that the information they uncover will be used against them. To reduce...

Environmental self-auditing by private firms is generally thought to both deserve and require encouragement. Firms can audit themselves more cheaply and effectively than can regulators, but too often are deterred for fear that the information they uncover will be used against them. To reduce...

I present a theory of distributed improvement that extends Agile, Lean, and the Theory of Constraints by demonstrating how to simultaneously improve global and local performance in large systems, especially large organisations. I describe simple, effective rules that allow anyone in an...

Will economic growth inevitably degrade the environment, throughout development?This paper presents a simple household-choice framework that emphasizes the tradeoffbetween pollution-causing consumption and pollution-reducing abatement expenditures.The framework yields a simple explanation for...

Tropical forests are estimated to release approximately 1.7 PgC per year as a result of deforestation. Avoiding tropical deforestation could potentially play a significant role in carbon mitigation over the next 50 years if not longer. Many policymakers and negotiators are skeptical of our...

This paper analyzes the determinants of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. From a model of optimal use, it derives and then estimates a deforestation equation on county-level data for the period 1978 to 1988. The data include a deforestation measure from satellite images, which is a great...