This article develops a non-cooperative game with managerial quantity-setting firms in which owners choose whether to delegate output and abatement decisions to managers through a contract based on emissions (conventionally denoted as ‘green’ delegation, GD) instead of sales (sales delegation, SD), and the government levies an emissions tax to incentivise firms’ emissions-reduction actions. First, it compares the Nash equilibrium outcomes between GD and SD and then contrasts them also with profit maximisation (PM). A plethora of Nash equilibria emerges, especially in the case GD versus PM (the ‘green delegation game’), depending on the public awareness toward environmental quality, ranging from the coordination game to the ‘green’ prisoner's dilemma. Second, though the contract under GD incentivises managers for emissions, the environmental damage is lower than under SD. This is because the optimal tax more than compensates the incentive for emissions. These findings suggest that designing GD contracts paradoxically favours environmental quality.

Cover crops can generate both on-farm and water-quality benefits. However, their use in Iowa remains subdued, partly due to implementation costs faced by farmers. We tested the hypothesis that monetary incentives through cost-share programs are effective at increasing the area of farmland planted to cover crops in Iowa, as opposed to the alternative in which the participants of cost-share programs would have planted the same cover-crop acreage in the absence of payment. We found that cost-share payments induced a 15 percentage-point expansion in cover-crop acreage beyond what would have been planted in the absence of payment, among farmers who participated in cost-share programs. The estimated additionality rate was 54%, suggesting at least half of cost-share expenditures funded cover-crop acreage that would not have been planted without payment. Furthermore, we estimated the public cost to reduce nitrogen loads to Iowa waterways via cover crop, beyond what would have occurred in the absence of cost-share programs, to be $1.72–$4.70 lb−1 N ($3.79–$10.36 kg−1 N). Farmers absorbed about 70% of those costs as private losses, and cost-share payments offset the remaining 30%. Although the additionality rate estimated in this study is less than what has been found in other states, the cost-share programs in Iowa have been relatively cost-effective, due to their lower payment rate.

This paper examines green alliances between environmental groups (EGs) and polluting firms, which have become more common in the last decades, and analyzes how they affect policy design. We first show that the activities of regulators and EGs are strategic substitutes, giving rise to free-riding incentives on both agents. Nonetheless, the presence of the EG yields smaller welfare benefits when firms are subject to regulation than when they are not. In addition, the introduction of environmental policy yields large welfare gains when the EG is absent but small benefits when the EG is already present.

This paper analyzes the effects of technological risk on long-run growth when labor supply is elastic and production gives rise to a pollution externality. We show that the randomness of production, as well as the endogeneity of labor supply, affects the equilibrium solutions for the social planner and for the market economy. We analyze the effects of environmental policy, discuss conditions for an optimal policy, and find that the response of labor supply to changes in the model parameters and to variations in the policy instruments crucially depends on the volatility of output.

This article analyzes the consequences of environmental public policy when private agents have access to abatement activity, financed by private contributions. The issue at stake is the interactions between private involvement in abatement activities and public intervention. The analysis of the consequences of environmental tax policy on capital and environmental quality shows that public and private abatements may or may not be substitutable, depending on abatement efficiencies and on the initial economic and environmental inefficiencies.

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) is a hypothesis stating that pollution rises with income at low income levels but falls at higher ones. We analyse the EKC in a representative consumer model in which pollution is generated by consumption and can be abated. We show that at low income levels no abatement is optimal and pollution increases with income. Once abatement expenditures are positive, we demonstrate that satiation in consumption is not only sufficient to find an EKC, but a tendency to satiation—or in other words the condition that environmental quality is a normal good—is even necessary if we assume a standard functional form for the pollution function. Finally, we reconsider the results of two related models of the literature: We verify that the relationship between the income elasticity of demand for environmental quality and the EKC is ambiguous.

(JEL: D62, O40, Q20)