Suchergebnisse

In this paper, I conduct one of the first evaluations of a voluntary management program that features an independent verification mechanism to determine whether it is achieving its ultimate objectives. Using a sample of thousands of manufacturing facilities across the United States, I find evidence that the ISO 14001 Environmental Management System Standard has attracted companies with superior environmental performance, and that adoption leads to further performance improvement. This contrasts sharply with findings from prior evaluations of voluntary management programs that lacked verification mechanisms. This suggests that independent verification mechanisms such as certification may be necessary for voluntary management programs to mitigate information asymmetries surrounding difficult-to-observe management practices. Implications are discussed for the industry-associations, government agencies, and the non-governmental organizations that design these programs, the companies that are investing resources to adopt these programs, and those that are relying on them as a credible signal of superior management practices. The substantial variation in magnitude and significance of the results across comparison groups and performance metrics highlights the need for researchers to conduct robustness tests when evaluating voluntary management programs.

Governments and other organizations often outsource activities to achieve cost savings from market competition. Yet such benefits are often accompanied by poor quality resulting from moral hazard, which can be particularly onerous when outsourcing the monitoring and enforcement of government regulation. In this paper, we argue that the considerable moral hazard associated with private regulatory monitoring can be mitigated by understanding conflicts of interest in the monitoring organizations' product/service portfolios and by the effects of their private governance mechanisms. These organizational characteristics affect the stringency of monitoring through reputation, customer loyalty, differential impacts of government sanctions, and the standardization and internal monitoring of operations. We test our theory in the context of vehicle emissions testing in a state in which the government has outsourced these inspections to the private sector. Analyzing millions of emissions tests, we find empirical support for our hypotheses that particular product portfolios and forms of governance can mitigate moral hazard. Our results have broad implications for regulation, financial auditing, and private credit and quality rating agencies in financial markets.

This document provides a summary of the results of a survey on Environmental Management Practices (EMP) conducted by the University of California at Santa Barbara during October and November 2003. The survey was sent to 3255 facilities in 8 industrial sectors: pulp, paper and paperboard mills, chemical and allied products, refining, primary metals, machinery, electronics /electrical, automotive, and utilities. The survey yielded 562 responses, which constitutes a 17.2% response rate. This summary includes a general description of the sample, a profile of the respondents, and summary statistics of facilities' environmental management practices, relations with stakeholders, and environmental performance measures. In addition, we report the factors that respondents noted were influencing them to improve their environmental performance and adopt particular environmental management practices. In many cases, these results are categorized by industry to facilitate comparisons. The environmental management practices we inquired about include the adoption of an environmental policy and its communication, the number of internal and external audits performed at the facility, the proportion of employees in various departments receiving environmental training, "green purchasing" policies, the adoption of the ISO 14001 international standard, participation in industry and governments voluntary programs, and solicitation of opinions from environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Overall, we identified important differences between industrial sectors in terms of the level of adoption of these environmental management practices. Companies can employ these survey results to benchmark their practices to facilities in their own industry as well as to other industries. In addition, government, NGOs, and local communities can employ this information to learn the prevalence of different environmental management practices across various industries, and to better understand how firms are motivated - and influenced - to adopt environmental management practices.

As part of a recent trend toward more cooperative relations between regulators and industry, novel government programs are encouraging firms to monitor their own regulatory compliance and voluntarily report their own violations. In this study, we examine how enforcement activities, statutory protections, community pressure, and organizational characteristics influence organizations' decisions to self-police. We created a comprehensive dataset for the "Audit Policy", a United States Environmental Protection Agency program that encourages companies to selfdisclose violations of environmental laws and regulations in exchange for reduced sanctions. We find that facilities were more likely to self-disclose if they were recently inspected or subjected to an enforcement action, were narrowly targeted for heightened scrutiny by a US EPA initiative, and were larger and thus more prominent in their environment. While we find some evidence that state-level statutory immunity facilitates self-disclosure, we find no evidence that statutory audit privilege does so.

Using data from a sample of U.S. industrial facilities subject to the federal Clean Air Act from 1993 to 2003, this article theorizes and tests the conditions under which organizations' symbolic commitments to self-regulate are particularly likely to result in improved compliance practices and outcomes. We argue that the legal environment, particularly as it is constructed by the enforcement activities of regulators, significantly influences the likelihood that organizations will effectively implement the self-regulatory commitments they symbolically adopt. We investigate how different enforcement tools can foster or undermine organizations' normative motivations to self-regulate. We find that organizations are more likely to follow through on their commitments to self-regulate when they (and their competitors) are subject to heavy regulatory surveillance and when they adopt self-regulation in the absence of an explicit threat of sanctions. We also find that historically poor compliers are significantly less likely to follow through on their commitments to self-regulate, suggesting a substantial limitation on the use of self-regulation as a strategy for reforming struggling organizations. Taken together, these findings suggest that self-regulation can be a useful tool for leveraging the normative motivations of regulated organizations but that it cannot replace traditional deterrence-based enforcement.

As part of a recent trend toward more cooperative relations between regulators and industry, novel government programs are encouraging firms to monitor their own regulatory compliance and voluntarily report their own violations. In this study, we examine how enforcement activities, statutory protections, community pressure, and organizational characteristics influence organizations' decisions to self-police. We created a comprehensive dataset for the "Audit Policy", a United States Environmental Protection Agency program that encourages companies to self-disclose violations of environmental laws and regulations in exchange for reduced sanctions. We find that facilities were more likely to self-disclose if they were recently inspected or subjected to an enforcement action, were narrowly targeted for heightened scrutiny by a US EPA initiative, and were larger and thus more prominent in their environment. While we find some evidence that state-level statutory immunity facilitates self-disclosure, we find no evidence that statutory audit privilege does so.