| Most of the theoretical literature on enforcing environmental policies focuses on situations in which pollution sources are noncompliant. However, some recent work suggests that these situations will very often involve suboptimal policy designs. Thus, the circumstances under which it is efficient to implement policies that do not motivate full compliance appear to be more limited than most of the literature would imply. In this paper, I identify several circumstances under which regulators may conserve enforcement costs by implementing emissions taxes that firms evade. I demonstrate that a regulator can use a firm’s tax evasion to reduce monitoring effort, but only if its monitoring strategy can be made an increasing function of the firm’s emissions, if... |
