Stefan Ambec

The Porter Hypothesis at 20: Can Environmental Regulation Enhance Innovation and Competitiveness?

Some twenty years ago, Harvard Business School economist and strategy professor Michael Porter challenged conventional wisdom about the impact of environmental regulation on business by declaring that well-designed regulation could actually enhance competitiveness. The traditional view of environmental regulation held by virtually all economists until that time was that requiring firms to reduce an externality like pollution necessarily restricted their options and thus by definition reduced their profits. After all, if profitable opportunities existed to reduce pollution, profit-maximizing firms would already be taking advantage of them. Over the past twenty years, much has been written about what has since become known simply as the Porter Hypothesis. Yet even today, we continue to find conflicting evidence concerning the Porter Hypothesis, alternative theories that might explain it, and oftentimes a misunderstanding of what the Porter Hypothesis does and does not say. This article examines the key theoretical foundations and empirical evidence concerning the Porter Hypothesis, discusses its implications for the design of environmental regulations, and outlines directions for future research on the relationship between environmental regulation, innovation, and competitiveness.

Environmental Policy, Innovation and Performance: New Insights on the Porter Hypothesis

Jaffe and Palmer (1997) present three distinct variants of the so- called Porter Hypothesis. The “weak” version of the hypothesis posits that environmental regulation will stimulate certain kinds of environmental innovations. The “narrow” version of the hypothesis asserts that flexible environmental policy regimes give firms greater incentive to innovate than prescriptive regulations, such as technology-based standards. Finally, the “strong” version posits that properly designed regulation may induce cost-saving innovation that more than compensates for the cost of compliance. In this paper, we test the significance of these different variants of the Porter Hypothesis using data on the four main elements of the hypothesised causality chain (environmental policy, research and development, environmental performance and commercial performance). The analysis is based upon a unique database which includes observations from approximately 4200 facilities in seven OECD countries. In general, we find strong support for the “weak” version, qualified support for the “narrow” version, and qualified support for the “strong” version as well.

Sharing a River

A group of agents located along a river have quasi-linear preferences over water and money. We ask how the water should be allocated and what money transfers should be performed. We are interested in efficiency, stability (in the sense of the core), and fairness (in a sense to be defined). We first show that the cooperative game associated with that problem is convex: its core is therefore large and easily described. Next, we propose the following fairness requirement: no group of agents should enjoy a welfare higher than what it could achieve in the absence of the remaining agents. We prove that only one welfare distribution in the core satisfies this condition: its marginal contribution vector corresponding to the ordering of the agents along the river. We discuss how it could be decentralized or implemented.

Fees or refuges: which is better for the sustainable management of insect resistance to transgenic Bt corn?

The evolution of resistance in insect pests will imperil the efficiency of transgenic insect-resistant crops. The currently advised strategy to delay resistance evolution is to plant non-toxic crops (refuges) in close proximity to plants engineered to express the toxic protein of the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). We seek answers to the question of how to induce growers to plant non-toxic crops. A first strategy, applied in the United States, is to require Bt growers to plant non-Bt refuges and control their compliance with requirements. We suggest that an alternative strategy is to make Bt seed more expensive by instituting a user fee, and we compare both strategies by integrating economic processes into a spatially explicit, population genetics model. Our results indicate that although both strategies may allow the sustainable management of the common pool of Bt-susceptibility alleles in pest populations, for the European corn borer (Ostrinia nubilalis) one of the most serious pests in the US corn belt, the fee strategy is less efficient than refuge requirements.

Sharing a resource with concave benefits

A group of agents are collectively entitled to a perfectly divisible good or resource. They enjoy concave and satiable benefit functions from consuming it. They also value money (transfers). The resource is scarce in the sense that not everybody can consume its satiated consumption level. This paper characterizes the unique (resource and money) allocation that is efficient, incentive-compatible and equal-sharing individual rational. It then discusses its implementation and its link with other axioms.

Regulation via the Polluter‐Pays Principle

We consider the problem of regulating an economy with environmental pollution. We examine the distributional impact of the polluter‐pays (PP) principle which requires that any agent compensates all other agents for the damages caused by his or her (pollution) emissions. With constant marginal damages we show that regulation via the PP principle leads to the unique welfare distribution that induces non‐negative individual welfare change and renders each agent responsible for his or her pollution impact. We extend both the PP principle and this result to increasing marginal damages due to pollution. We also compare the PP principle with the Vickrey–Clark–Groves scheme.

On the Redistributive Impact of Privatizing a Resource under Imperfect Enforcement

We consider the redistributive effects of privatizing a resource previously exploited under free access. We assume that illegal extraction is punished but that the sanction is bounded by individuals wealth. First, we show that a segment of intermediate-wea lth individuals is the most adversely affected from the regime change, while the poorest segment is not only less severely affected, but may actually gain from it. Next, we show how the authorities may prefer to choose an intermediate enforcement level in order to maximize the political acceptability of the regime switch among the local community.

Fair Intergenerational Sharing of a Natural Resource

In this article, overlapping generations are extracting a natural resource over an infinite future. We examine the fair allocation of resource and compensations among generations. Fairness is defined by core lower bounds and aspiration upper bounds. The core lower bounds require that every coalition of generations obtains at least what it could achieve by itself. The aspiration upper bounds require that no coalition of generations enjoys a higher welfare than it would achieve if nobody else extracted the resource. We show that, upon existence, the allocation that satisfies the two fairness criteria is unique and assigns to each generation its marginal contribution to the preceding generation. Finally, we describe the dynamics of such an allocation.

The distributional impact of common-pool resource regulations

Purpose - Regulating common-pool resources is welfare enhancing for society but not necessarily for all users who may therefore oppose regulations. The purpose of this paper is to examine the short-term impact of common-pool resource regulations on welfare distribution. Design/methodology/approach - The authors model a game of common-pool resource extraction among heterogeneous users. Findings - It was found that market-based regulations such as fees and subsidies or tradable quotas achieve a higher reduction of extraction from free-access than individual quotas with the same proportion of better-off users. Also, they make more users better-off for the same resource preservation. Originality/value - The quota regulation has attractive fairness properties: it reduces inequality while still rewarding the more efficient users.

Cooperative decision-making for the provision of a locally undesirable facility

We consider the decentralized provision of a global public good with local externalities in a spatially explicit model. Communities decide on the location of a facility that benefits everyone but exhibits costs to the host and its neighbors. They share the costs through transfers. We examine cooperative games associated with this so-called Not In My Back-Yard problem. We derive and discuss conditions for core solutions to exist. These conditions are driven by the temptation to exclude groups of neighbors at any potential location. We illustrate the results in different spatial settings. These results clarify how property rights can affect cooperation and shed further light on a limitation of the Coase theorem.