The German Environmental Liability Law (ELL) of 1991 has introduced far-reaching civil liability for environmental damages with the aim to increase firms’ efforts to prevent accidents. Previous studies find poor evidence that this goal has actually been achieved. One and a half decades after the introduction of that law, we undertake a new attempt to investigate the impact of the ELL on accident prevention. Our analysis is based on annual data on the number of environmental accidents per year, reported to the monitoring agency ZEMA, and the risk premium imposed by a large German insurer on environmental liability insurance (ELI). As reliable accident reporting has begun only after the implementation of the new law into practice, pre- and post-reform levels of accident prevention cannot be directly compared. However, the time series of ELI premiums cuts across these two periods. Once we examine the relationship between the ELI premium and accident prevention and observe the effect of the reform impulse on the former, we are able to model the dynamics of the adjustment process induced by the ELL. According to our results, the average number of environmental accidents per year has decreased from 29 before to 17 and a half after the reform. Our dynamic analysis reveals an overshooting of the insurance premiums in the first years after the reform and a successive decrease from 1997 onwards. The premiums and firms’ prevention efforts achieved a new equilibrium in 2000.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Faculty of Economics and Statistics, University of Innsbruck in its series Working Papers with number
2007-11.
Find related papers by JEL classification: K32 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - Environmental, Health, and Safety Law K13 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Tort Law and Product Liability Q58 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Government Policy
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports: