IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cir/cirwor/99s-11.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Incentives for Pollution Control: Regulation or (and?) Information

Author

Listed:
  • Jérôme Foulon
  • Paul Lanoie
  • Benoit Laplante

Abstract

An increasing number of regulators have adopted public disclosure programs to create incentives for pollution control. In this paper, we study the impact of British Columbia's list of polluters whereby the province's environmental regulator reveals the name of plants which are either not complying with the regulation or are of concern to the regulator. Simultaneously however, the regulator continues to undertake legal action for those violating the regulation. Previous analyses have focused on studying either the impact of the traditional monitoring and enforcement practices or the impact of information programs. In this paper, we perform an empirical analysis of the impact of both traditional enforcement and information strategies within the context of a single program. We thus provide insights on the relative impact of the traditional (fines and penalties) and emerging (information) enforcement strategies. Our results suggest that British Columbia's list of polluters has a larger impact on both emissions levels and compliance status than orders, fines and penalties traditionally imposed by the Ministry and courts. Our results also demonstrate that the adoption of stricter standards and penalties had a significant impact on emissions levels. De plus en plus de décideurs publics dans le domaine de l'environnement ont adopté des politiques de diffusion de l'information pour créer des incitations à une meilleure performance environnementale. Dans cette étude, nous examinons l'impact d'une liste noire de pollueurs publiée à tous les six mois, depuis 1990, par le Ministère de l'environnement en Colombie-Britannique qui, parallèlement à cela, poursuit une stratégie traditionnelle de contrôle et de mise en application de la réglementation. Les recherches précédentes ont examiné de façon isolée l'impact des mesures traditionnelles de réglementation et l'impact des programmes d'information, alors que nous proposons d'étudier simultanément les effets de ces deux types de mesures. Ce faisant, nous pourrons avoir une idée de l'impact relatif des mesures traditionnelles et émergentes. Nos résultats suggèrent que la liste des pollueurs de Colombie-Britannique a eu un impact plus important que les poursuites et les amendes traditionnellement émises par les autorités gouvernementales. Nos résultats montrent également que l'adoption de normes environnementales plus strictes a eu un effet important sur la performance environnementale des usines étudiées.

Suggested Citation

  • Jérôme Foulon & Paul Lanoie & Benoit Laplante, 1999. "Incentives for Pollution Control: Regulation or (and?) Information," CIRANO Working Papers 99s-11, CIRANO.
    • Handle: RePEc:cir:cirwor:99s-11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cirano.qc.ca/files/publications/99s-11.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. W. Bentley MacLeod & Daniel Parent, 1999. "Job characteristics, wages, and the employment contract," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue May, pages 13-27.
    2. Eric Ghysels & Denise R. Osborn & Paulo M. M. Rodrigues, 1999. "Seasonal Nonstationarity and Near-Nonstationarity," CIRANO Working Papers 99s-05, CIRANO.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ronaldo Seroa da Motta, 2004. "Analyzing the Environmental performance of the Brazilian Industrial Sector," Discussion Papers 1053, Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada - IPEA.
    2. Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné, 2000. "Environmental Risk Management and the Business Firm," CIRANO Working Papers 2000s-23, CIRANO.
    3. Cremer, Helmuth & Gahvari, Firouz, 2002. "Imperfect observability of emissions and second-best emission and output taxes," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 85(3), pages 385-407, September.
    4. Caplan, Arthur J., 2003. "Reputation and the control of pollution," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(2-3), pages 197-212, December.
    5. Keren Priyadarshini & Omprakash K. Gupta, 2003. "Compliance to Environmental Regulations: The Indian Context," International Journal of Business and Economics, School of Management Development, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan, vol. 2(1), pages 9-26, April.
    6. Ronaldo Seroa da Motta, 2015. "Analyzing the Environmental Performance of the Brazilian Industrial Sector," Discussion Papers 0137, Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada - IPEA.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Arantxa Jarque, 2010. "Hidden effort, learning by doing, and wage dynamics," Economic Quarterly, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, vol. 96(4Q), pages 339-372.
    2. Long, Ngo Van & Soubeyran, Antoine, 2001. "Cost Manipulation Games in Oligopoly, with Costs of Manipulating," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 42(2), pages 505-533, May.
    3. Ernst Fehr & Klaus M. Schmidt, 2004. "Fairness and Incentives in a Multi‐task Principal–Agent Model," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 106(3), pages 453-474, October.
    4. John W. Galbraith, 1999. "Content Horizons For Forecasts Of Economic Time Series," Departmental Working Papers 1999-01, McGill University, Department of Economics.
    5. Luis C. Nunes & Paulo M. M. Rodrigues, 2011. "On LM‐type tests for seasonal unit roots in the presence of a break in trend," Journal of Time Series Analysis, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(2), pages 108-134, March.
    6. Marcel Boyer & Armel Jacques & Michel Moreaux, 1998. "Better Observability Promotes the Adoption of More Flexible Technologies," CIRANO Working Papers 98s-38, CIRANO.
    7. Carstensen, Vivian, 2002. "The From-Tayloristic-to-Holistic-Organization Model From an Empirical Perspective," Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) dp-256, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät.
    8. Michelle Alexopoulos, 2006. "Shirking in a monetary business cycle model," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 39(3), pages 689-718, August.
    9. Anders Frederiksen & Elod Takats, 2005. "Layoffs as Part of an Optimal Incentive Mix: Theory and Evidence," Working Papers 881, Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section..
    10. Alexopoulos, Michelle, 2007. "A monetary business cycle model with unemployment," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 31(12), pages 3904-3940, December.
    11. Daniel Parent, 2001. "Incentive Pay in the United States: Its Determinants and Its Effects," CIRANO Working Papers 2001s-04, CIRANO.
    12. Artur C. B. da Silva Lopes & Antonio Montanes, 2005. "The Behavior Of Hegy Tests For Quarterly Time Series With Seasonal Mean Shifts," Econometric Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 24(1), pages 83-108.
    13. Anders Frederiksen & Elod Takats, 2005. "Layoffs as Part of an Optimal Incentive Mix: Theory and Evidence," Working Papers 881, Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section..
    14. Patrice Roussel & Michel Tremblay, 1999. "Modelling the Role of Organizational Justice: Effects on Satisfaction and Unionization Propensity of Canadian Managers," CIRANO Working Papers 99s-16, CIRANO.
    15. Suvorov, Anton & van de Ven, Jeroen, 2009. "Discretionary rewards as a feedback mechanism," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 67(2), pages 665-681, November.
    16. Psaradakis, Zacharias, 2000. "Bootstrap tests for unit roots in seasonal autoregressive models," Statistics & Probability Letters, Elsevier, vol. 50(4), pages 389-395, December.
    17. Martin, Rachel & Thomas, Tyler, 2022. "Target setting with compensation discretion: How are ex ante targets affected when superiors have ex post discretion?," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 97(C).
    18. Garen, John, 2006. "Use of employees and alternative work arrangements in the United States: a law, economics, and organizations perspective," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 107-141, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Regulation; information; Information; réglementation;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cir:cirwor:99s-11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Webmaster (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ciranca.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.