Incentives for Pollution Control: Regulation or Information?

Empirical analyses on monitoring and enforcement issues have focused attention either on studying the impact of traditional monitoring and enforcement practices on the environmental performance of polluters or on studying the impact of public disclosure programs. In this paper, we perform an empirical analysis of the impact of both traditional enforcement and information strategies within the context of a single program. We thus provide insights on the relative impact of the traditional (fines and penalties) and emerging (public disclosure) enforcement strategies. We present evidence that the public disclosure of environmental performance does create additional and strong incentives for pollution control