Despite the well-known static cost-inefficiency of uniform emission standards to control pollution, governments continue to use them in a variety of settings. In this paper, we show that inspection agencies can sometimes use their informational advantage to design monitoring strategies that...

Over time, inspection agencies gather information about firms’ pollution levels and this information may allow agencies to differentiate their monitoring strategies in the future. If a firm is less successful than its peers in reducing emissions, it faces the risk of being targeted for...

In this paper, we analyze whether it is socially desirable that fines for exceeding pollution standards depend not only on the degree of non-compliance but also on technology investment efforts by the polluting firms. For that purpose, we consider a partial equilibrium framework where a...

Over time, inspection agencies gather information about firms that cause harmful externalities. This information may allow agencies to differentiate their monitoring strategies in the future, since inspections can be influenced by firms' past performance relative to other competitors in the...

Effluent limits are frequently based on a uniform emission standard, which applies to all polluting facilities within a single industry. However, the implementation of many environmental protection laws does not lead to uniform effluent limits due to considerations of local environmental...

In this paper we present a Stackelberg differential game to study the dynamic interaction between a polluting firm and a regulator who sets pollution limits overtime. At each time, the firm settles emissions taking into account the fine for non-compliance, and balances current costs of...