Self-Reporting and Private Enforcement in Environmental Regulation

Self-reporting of compliance status has become a common feature in the enforcement of environmental regulation. In this paper, I generalize existing models of enforcement with self-reporting to include the possibility of private enforcement of regulation through citizen suits. This allows me to identify an additional argument for the efficiency of self-reporting: it can increase the likelihood of a successful suit and thus facilitate private enforcement of regulation. Specifically, if self-reporting sufficiently increases the expected penalty for losing a citizen suit, if the costs of private enforcement are low, and if inspection costs are high enough relative to enforcement costs, self-reporting lowers expected regulatory and social costs by allowing the regulator to rely on private enforcement and decrease his enforcement efforts.

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The Tax Man Cometh: Constitutional Principles for Tax Enforcement

Passage of an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) overhaul bill in 1998 reflects the depth of American taxpayer frustration with the agency. We bring a constitutional, or rules of the game, perspective to tax enforcement. We examine political costs and benefits and agency discretion as reasons why tax enforcement by the government might deviate from the preferences of a representative citizen. We also examine prospects for reform. Lasting reform must alter the rules for deciding tax enforcement policy or the political pressures which yield excessive enforcement today will reemerge in the future.     

控股股东、实际控制权与小股东权益保护

股权集中型公司是现代公司的主流组织形态之一,其代理成本主要产生于控股股东与小股东之间存在的利益冲突.通过发行多种类股票、交叉持股和金字塔式控股等方式,控股股东能够获取比与其股权份额相对应的名义控制权更大的实际控制权,因而更容易发生以侵害小股东权益作代价追求控制权私下收益的道德风险行为,致使代理成本高昂.声誉机制和法律手段能够迫使控股股东收敛侵占行为,且法律手段较声誉机制更为有效.在中国,声誉机制对控股股东基本不起作用,保护小股东权益的最为有效的措施是完善相关立法并加大执法力度.     

Debt financing,soft budget constraints,and government ownershipEvidence from China1

Debt financing is expected to improve the quality of corporate governance, but we find, using a large sample of public listed companies (PLCs) from China, that an increase in bank loans increases the size of managerial perks and free cash flows and decreases corporate efficiency. We find that bank lending facilitates managerial exploitation of corporate wealth in government‐controlled firms, but constrains managerial agency costs in firms controlled by private owners. We argue that the failure of corporate governance may derive from the shared government ownership of lenders and borrowers, which nurtures soft budget constraints.     

The excess burden of tax evasion—An experimental detection-concealment contest

Tax evasion may cause social welfare losses due to the incentives of taxpayers to invest in the concealment and of tax authorities to invest in the detection of tax evasion. Reducing the investment of both parties at the same time would then lead to a Pareto improvement. Given that concealment and detection costs are hardly measurable in reality, we show in a controlled laboratory experiment that the welfare losses from a concealment-detection contest depend positively on the prevailing tax rate, but not on the penalty which is imposed in case of detected tax evasion. Hence, policy makers who are concerned about socially inefficient concealment and enforcement costs should focus on tax rates rather than penalty rates.     

The effect of EPA enforcement funding on private-sector pollution-control investment

The paper estimates the effects of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforcement budget upon the demand for pollution-control equipment in the private sector. There are two possible effects. A direct effect occurs when the enforcement budget is used for inspections that result in enforced compliance requiring additional pollution control equipment. A second effect is anticipatory, and arises from the private sector's objective of minimizing expected costs due to fines imposed by the EPA for infractions of pollution-control requirements. This component of demand depends, in part, on the EPA enforcement budget. We find that increases in the EPA budget increase the demand for pollution-abatement equipment. This in turn implies that increases in the EPA enforcement budget have been effective in mitigating pollution.     

The warnings puzzle: an upstream explanation

Enforcement agencies issuing warnings are an empirical regularity in the enforcement of laws and regulations, but a challenge to the standard economic theory of public enforcement. A number of recent contributions explain the popularity of warnings as a response to information asymmetries between regulator and regulatee. We offer a distinct, but complementary explanation: Warnings can serve as a signaling device in the interaction between the enforcement agency and its budget-setting authority. By using costly warnings for minor offenses that would otherwise not be pursued, the agency can generate observable activity to escape budget cuts in subsequent periods. We show in a stylized model that warnings may indeed occur in an equilibrium of a game in which warnings are entirely unproductive in the agency-regulatee interaction, and thereby derive a testable hypothesis on regulatory agency behavior.     

Coal gasification: An economic evaluation

Political interest in developing the capability to produce gaseous fuel from coal in the United States has been cyclical in nature, depending primarily upon the security of the international market for oil and public attitudes toward nuclear power. Interest in coal gasification technology by private investors, however, depends primarily on the economic and technological considerations analyzed in this paper. A cost forecasting model is developed with the capability to take into account future economic and technological uncertainties associated with producing high BTU gas (a substitute for natural gas) from coal. The cost forecasting model incorporates probabilistic information on key economic and technological parameters subject to future uncertainty and simulates, by Monte Carlo methods, the costs which private investors would incur over the life of a commercial size coal gasification plant. The results suggest it is highly unlikely that the coal gasification process could produce high BTU gas more cheaply than the price at which natural gas is likely to be available.The cost forecasting model is also modified to compare the cost per kilowatt–hour of generated electricity when fueling a 1,000 Mw power plant with oil versus high BTU gas from coal. Again, based upon the costs to private investors, the simulation results indicate a very low probability that high BTU gas from coal would prove the least costly fuel for generating electricity.The implied economic infeasibility for private investment in coal gasification does not necessarily provide a basis for public policy to abandon the technology. Public policy recommendations must consider social costs as well as private costs. Possibly the greatest social cost associated with abandoning coal gasification is the risk of a significant energy supply interruption. A diversified national energy policy including coal gasification may in fact be less costly if relevant social costs are included in the calculations. Results from the cost forecasting model indicate the size and type of public subsidies that may be necessary to support a diversified energy industry which would include coal gasification.     

Research on equity adjustment,agency costs and commercial bank performance: experimental evidence from China

This article studies the impact of options to adjust the performance of commercial banks from agency costs. In the shareholding structure of the adjustment process, considering changes in agency costs, only in agency costs no more than the commercial banks when new results, the company will have to adjust agent the cost of power stealth measure more just by reflecting the size of the incremental results. In addition, equity restructuring costs are the basis of agency governance and ownership structure has an important impact on agency costs. Through a few selected China 14 listed commercial banks’ 2007–2012 data, we show that the impact of performance of commercial banks on the proportion of the company’s largest shareholders is generally more significant; however, the impact of equity restriction on commercial banks was not as significant, as seen from the application of balanced panel data model analysis and the test results. However, the agency costs of commercial bank performance were significant also in a general state, indicating that equity adjustment activities of commercial banks’ cost perspective agency under the commercial bank performance significant changes are not large.     

Performance Pay and Adverse Selection*

It is well known in personnel economics that firms may improve the quality of their workforce by offering performance pay. We analyze an equilibrium model where worker productivity is private information and show that the firms’ gain from worker self‐selection may not be matched by a corresponding social gain. In particular, the equilibrium incentive contracts are excessively high‐powered, thereby inducing the more productive workers to exert too much effort and increasing agency costs stemming from the misallocation of effort.     

Enforcing Emissions Trading when Emissions Permits are Bankable

We propose enforcement strategies for emissions trading programs with bankable emissions permits that guarantee complete compliance with minimal enforcement costs. Our strategies emphasize imperfect monitoring supported by a high unit penalty for reporting violations, and tying this penalty directly to equilibrium permit prices. This approach is quite different from several existing enforcement strategies that emphasize high unit penalties for emissions in excess of permit holdings. Our analysis suggests that a high penalty for excess emissions cannot be used to conserve monitoring effort, and that it may actually increase the amount of monitoring necessary to maintain compliance.The authors are grateful to Anthony Heyes and three anonymous referees for their valuable comments. Partial support for this research was provided by the Cooperative State Research Extension, Education Service, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station under Project No. MAS00871.     

Self-Regulation and Government Oversight

Self-regulation is a feature of a number of professions. For example, in the U.S. the government delegates aspects of financial market regulation to self-regulatory organizations (SROs) like the New York Stock Exchange and the National Association of Securities Dealers. We analyse one regulatory task of an SRO, enforcing antifraud rules so agents will not cheat customers. Specifically, we model contracting/enforcement as a two-tier problem. An SRO chooses its enforcement policy: the likelihood that an agent is investigated for fraud and a penalty schedule. Given an enforcement policy, agents compete by offering contracts that maximize customers' expected utility. We assume that the SRO's objective is to maximize the welfare of its members, the agents. We show that the SRO chooses a more lax enforcement policy—meaning less frequent investigations—than what customers would choose. A general conclusion is that control of the enforcement policy governing contracts confers substantial market power to a group of otherwise competitive agents. We also investigate government oversight of the self-regulatory process. The threat of government enforcement leads to more enforcement by the SRO, just enough to pre-empt any government enforcement.     

我国上市公司风险管理决策的实证研究

本文应用公司财务理论,对我国上市公司风险管理费用的决定因素进行实证研究。从公司的财务困境成本、代理成本、税率等因素出发讨论了公司风险管理决策行为,并建立了单变量和多变量模型分析我国公司风险管理费用的决定因素。在风险管理方面,研究表明,对于我国公司在风险管理方面的决策行为,地方政府的保护行为有很大的影响。     

Private enforcement,corruption, and antitrust design

We examine how the rationale for enabling versus precluding private antitrust enforcement depends on whether antitrust enforcement is corruption-free or plagued by corruption. Corruption in courts affects the incentives to bring forth private antitrust lawsuits. This, in turn, along with corruption in antitrust agency enforcement, alters the incentives to commit antitrust violations. The social welfare effect of enabling private antitrust enforcement in the presence of corruption depends on whether corrupt officials in the ensuing bribery contests favor a particular firm and if so which one and to what extent. Under some circumstances, corruption actually increases the social desirability of private antitrust enforcement relative to the no-corruption scenario. Our analysis highlights that the effects of a given legal arrangement for antitrust enforcement critically depend on the corruption environment and, thus, that the appropriate design of antitrust institutions is context-specific.     

股权激励与代理成本

传统以管理费用率作为代理成本的替代不能恰当地反映管理者在职消费和职务侵占的真实水平,本文用经过Jones模型纠正的费用率作为代理成本的替代,考察了所有权性质、总经理持股与否及持股比例对代理成本的影响。本文提供了私有制下总经理适当持股有利于降低代理成本的可靠证据,为中国上市公司即将展开的股权激励计划提供证据的支持。     

Monopolistic screening and uninformed buyers

In the standard monopolistic screening problem, buyers obtain information rent as a result of possessing private information; if a contract can be offered before the buyer knows his valuation, the seller can extract the full (expected) surplus. I consider a situation where the buyer may or may not have private information about his valuation at the time the contract is offered. Is the seller (strictly) better off as compared to the standard situation? The answer depends crucially on the specific model. In the 2-types model, unless the probability (that the buyer is uninformed) reaches a critical threshold, the seller is unable to benefit from the buyer's ignorance. In the continuum-types model, on the other hand, optimal expected profit is strictly higher than in the standard model whenever this probability is positive.     

A theory of legal presumptions

This article analyzes how legal presumptions can mediate betweencostly litigation and ex ante incentives. We augment a moralhazard model with a redistributional litigation game in whicha presumption parameterizes how a court 'weighs' evidence offeredby the opposing sides. Strong prodefendant presumptions forecloselawsuits altogether, but also engender shirking. Strong proplaintiffpresumptions have the opposite effects. Moderate presumptionsgive rise to equilibria in which both shirking and suit occurprobabilisitically. The socially optimal presumption tradesoff agency costs against litigation costs, and could be eitherstrong or moderate, depending on the social importance of effort,the costs of filing suit, and the comparative advantage thatdiligent agents have over their shirking counterparts in mountinga defense. We posit three applications of our model: the litigationrate effects of the 1995 Private Securities Litigation ReformAct, the business judgment rule in corporations law, and fiduciaryduties in financially distressed firms.     

Penalty Functions for Environmental Violations: Evidence from Water Quality Enforcement

We empirically estimate a penalty function for water quality violations of private firms in Georgia. We find that seriousness of infraction and historical compliance records strongly influence penalty levels, while the intentionality of violations and the method of discovery do not. The size of the polluting company is also an important determinant of financial penalties. Overall the results support the plausibility of modeling assumptions used in much the theoretical enforcement literature but indicate the need for caution in interpreting models that assume penalty amounts are invariant to violation characteristics.     

Private versus verifiable interim performance evaluations under uncertainty

I study the trade-off between private and verifiable interim performance evaluations under uncertainty. More uncertainty leads to higher agency costs if the interim evaluation is public and verifiable but lower agency costs if the interim evaluation is private and unverifiable.     

REGULATION OF POLLUTION IN THE LABORATORY: RANDOM INSPECTIONS,AMBIENT INSPECTIONS,AND COMMITMENT PROBLEMS

We compare experimentally a traditional random inspection policy and a variant where the agency may carry out a preliminary inspection of the level of ambient pollution before implementing any individual inspection. Since the agency may have an incentive to announce high inspection probabilities and then secretly renege on its announcement to avoid implementing costly inspections, we are also interested in the agency's commitment power. We find that overall, ambient inspections increase efficiency but the effect is weaker than expected when the agency has no commitment power; and polluters' reactions to the lack of commitment power of the agency vary depending on whether the agency uses ambient inspections or not.