After weighing the costs and benefits of pollution control, profit-maximizing firms sometimes choose not to invest in pollution abatement because the penalty they expect regulators to impose for noncompliance falls short of the cost of abatement. To improve incentives for pollution control, regulators have recently embarked on a strategy to release information to communities and markets (investors and consumers) about firms'environmental performance. Drawing on evidence from American and Canadian studies, the authors report that capital markets do react to the release of such information. The evidence suggests that heavy polluters are affected more significantly than minor polluters. And firms whose market values are hurt most by the release of this information are most likely to invest in pollution abatement. The firms'greater willingness to invest in pollution abatement seems to result from the regulators'willingness to undertake strong enforcement actions combined with the possibility of capital markets reacting to public ranking of firms in terms of their environmental performance.
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
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)