Making things stick: Enforcement and compliance

Environmental rules and regulations are only useful insofar as firms can be persuaded to comply with them-in full or in part. We survey the rapidly gr owing literature on the enforcement aspects of environmental policy. The di fficulties facing any regulatory agency are likely to be exacerbated by inf ormation problems, penalty constraints, and the evasion efforts of firms, a nd we emphasize the role that recent innovative approaches to implementatio n can play in bolstering more traditional enforcement instruments.