Firms’ Emissions and Self-Reporting Under Competitive Audit Mechanisms

Many environmental tax systems rely on self-reported emissions by firms. These emission reports are verified through costly auditing efforts by regulatory agencies that are constrained in their auditing budgets. A typical assumption in the literature is that the agencies allocate audit efforts randomly among otherwise identical firms (random audit mechanism). This paper compares the incentives on firms’ emissions and self-reporting behavior under the random audit mechanism to the incentives under competitive audit mechanisms (CAMs). Under CAMs, higher reported emissions by a firm relative to other firms result in a lower audit intensity. This creates a reporting contest between the firms. The two CAMs under investigation apply different degrees of competitiveness in the reporting contest. I find that both CAMs lead to more truthful reporting, which is in line with the previous literature. Interestingly and novel to the literature, I find that some competition in reporting may induce fewer emissions compared with random auditing, while too much competition in reporting may induce comparatively higher emissions caused by firms. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015