Enforcement missions: Targets vs budgets

Anthony Heyes and Sandeep Kapur

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2009, vol. 58, issue 2, pages 129-140

Abstract: Enforcement of policy is typically delegated. What sort of mission should the head of an enforcement program be given? When there is more than one firm being regulated the firms' decision problems--otherwise completely separate--become linked in a way that depends on that mission. Under some sorts of missions firms compete to avoid the attention of the enforcer by competitive reductions in the extent of their non-compliance, in others the interaction encourages competitive expansions. We develop a general model that allows for the ordering of some typical classes of missions. We find that in plausible settings [`]target-driven' missions (that set a hard target in terms of environmental outcome but flexible budget) achieve the same outcome at lower cost than [`]budget-driven' ones (that fix the enforcement budget). Inspection of some fixed fraction of firms is never optimal.

Keywords: Enforcement; Regulatory; missions; Policy; delegation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6WJ6 ... 181ff8ffa92a74e4df56
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeeman:v:58:y:2009:i:2:p:129-140

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management is edited by C.F. Mason

More articles in Journal of Environmental Economics and Management from Elsevier
Series data maintained by Heidi Boesdal ().