Legislation

About: Legislation is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 62664 publications have been published within this topic receiving 585188 citations. The topic is also known as: law & act.

Global Environmental Regulation: Instrument Choice in Legal Context

Abstract: A central issue in environmental law is the choice among regulatory instruments. From Pigou to Coase to the present, scholars have debated the relative merits of liability rules, property rules, technology standards, taxes, subsidies, and tradeable allowances. An emerging scholarly consensus in economics and law would crown taxes as the presumptive optimal instrument for controlling environmental externalities. But this debate has largely been confined to the context of national law. This article examines the choice of regulatory instruments at the global level--the Olympics of instrument choice. It contends that the choice of optimal regulatory instrument is contingent on the underlying legal system of the regulatory polity. The article focuses on two salient dimensions of variation across legal systems; the voting rule for adoption of law, and the implementation structure for execution of law. The economics literature on instrument choice typically assumes that the regulator wields automatic fiat and unitary implementation. National regulatory legislation is generally adopted under a majoritarian voting rule which can compel sources of externalities to comply, and executed through a federalist structure which can impose constraints directly on sources. By contrast, global regulatory treaties are generally adopted under a voluntary assent voting rule which requires source countries to choose to participate, and executed through a jurisdictional structure which requires regulation to be implemented by nation-state intermediaries. The article argues that the fundamental differences along these two dimensions between the national and global legal systems--voting rules and implementation structures--make tradeable allowances, not taxes, the presumptive first choice for environmental protection at the global level. The article shows that the voluntary assent voting rule for international treaty law necessitates side payments to engage reluctant sources of externalities--a "beneficiaries pay" rather than a "polluters pay" approach. And it shows that making such side payments is more "participation efficient" under tradeable allowances than under taxes, where participation efficiency is defined as minimizing the sum of the costs of securing participation (which include not only out-of-pocket costs but also the moral hazard distortions induced by subsidizing or compensating polluters for the costs of abatement) plus the costs of enduring nonparticipation (which include "leakage" of the externality-generating activities from regulated to unregulated jurisdictions). The article argues that when participation must be secured rather than coerced, side payments can be made in a more participation efficient manner alongside tradeable allowances than alongside other instruments. In addition, the article shows that implementation by nation-states makes taxes more costly to monitor than tradeable allowances. In concert, these two legal system variables counsel selection of tradeable allowances, not taxes or command-and-control technology standards, to address global environmental problems such as greenhouse warming and biodiversity loss. More generally, the article argues that whether the regulatory polity is the entire planet or a local neighborhood, the prevailing voting rule and implementation structure will powerfully affect the relative merits of regulatory instruments, and that the debate over instrument choice needs to be reconceived with more explicit attention to the assumed underlying legal framework. Indeed, the article suggests that a key explanation for the divergence between the Pigouvian and Coasean approaches is the assumed underlying legal system. The article seeks to demonstrate that in the design of international regulatory law, economics matters; and, at the same time, that in the economics of regulatory design, law matters.

An Operations Perspective on Product Take‐Back Legislation for E‐Waste: Theory, Practice, and Research Needs

Abstract: Agrowing stream of environmental legislation enforces collection and recycling of used electrical and electronics products. Based on our experiences with producers coping with e-waste legislation, we find that there is a strong need for research on the implications of such legislation from an operations perspective. In particular, as a discipline at the interface of systems design and economic modeling, operations focused research can be extremely useful in identifying appropriate e-waste take-back implementations for different business environments and how producers should react to them.

The climate lobby: a sectoral analysis of lobbying spending on climate change in the USA, 2000 to 2016.

Abstract: Lobbying is considered to be an important factor in the success or failure of climate change legislation. This paper provides an estimate of lobbying expenditures related to climate change legislation in the U.S. Congress from 2000 to 2016. During this time period, over $2 billion was spent on this activity, constituting 3.9% of total lobbying expenditures. Major sectors involved in lobbying were fossil fuel and transportation corporations, utilities, and affiliated trade associations. Expenditures by these sectors dwarf those of environmental organizations and renewable energy corporations. Levels of expenditures on lobbying appear to be related to the introduction and probability of passage of significant climate legislation. Future research should focus on tying particular positions on climate legislation and lobbying expenditures at the corporate level.