Environmental Policy

Aseem Prakash and I are currently studying how voluntary programs such as ISO 14001 encourage businesses to go beyond legal requirements in protecting the environment. We conceptualize voluntary programs as club goods that provide members non-rival but potentially excludable benefits.  For firms, the value of joining an effective voluntary environmental club over taking the same actions unilaterally is to appropriate the club’s positive reputation with stakeholders. Important questions in this area are why do firms join voluntary programs whose requirements are more stringent than government regulations?  Does joining a voluntary program change firms' behavior, such as improving their compliance with government regulations? Voluntary programs may also facilitate cooperation between government regulators and regulated firms can achieve the best outcomes for both: improved environmental performance at the lowest cost.  Regulators cooperate by providing regulatory relief (forgiving) voluntarily disclosed violations and firms cooperate by voluntarily self-monitoring and reporting their own violations.  However, such cooperation requires that regulators trust facilities to self-monitor and disclose violations and that firms trust regulators to refrain from fully sanctioning all disclosed violations.  Our project investigates how facilities and regulators can establish and reinforce such cooperation by adopting cooperative policies and establishing a pattern of cooperative interactions with each other.  We investigate these questions by conducting a large-scale empirical study that evaluates cooperation between firms and regulators over time, across states and across countries.  We focus on ISO 14001, a voluntary regulation that promises to improve firms’ environmental performance by codifying strict environmental management standards. 

Government Contracting

I study government contracting with Trevor Brown of Ohio State University and David Van Slyke of Syracuse University.  In a series of papers, we study how local governments can improve service delivery by investing in contract management capacity.  Improving contract management reduces governments’ uncertainty surrounding vendors’ performance and improves contract outcomes.  Varying contracting capacity may thus explain the uneven record in contracting research: governments investing in contracting capacity may be better positioned to harness the promise of effective contracting while avoiding its pitfalls.  We are currently conducting a study of the US Coast Guard’s Deepwater program. 

Legislatures and Agenda Setting

My final research track examines how legislators grapple the uncertainty inherent in group decisions.  A series of papers co-authored with Jeff Talbert of the University of Kentucky explores how the rules of the House allow party leaders to strategically select policy proposals and structure floor decisions to mitigate the uncertainty inherent in majority cycling problems.  These papers trace the policy process from agenda setting and policy proposals, through floor decisions, to policy implementation in legislators’ districts.   Other work in this area examines how decision rules governing agenda control and the policy process can dramatically alter policy outcomes.