This work presents the results of framed field experiments designed to study the joint problem of managing harvests from a common pool resource and protecting the resource from poaching. The experiments were conducted both in the field with TURF users and in the lab with university students. Our study has two objectives. First, we designed our experiments to study the effects of poaching on the ability of common pool resource users to coordinate their harvests when encroachment by outsiders is unrestricted and when the government provides weak enforcement.

Recent theoretical developments show the conditions under which it is cost-effective for the regulator to induce perfect compliance in cap-and-trade programs. These conditions are based on the ability that a regulator with perfect information has to induce the firms to emit any desired level with different combinations of the number of permits supplied to the market and the monitoring probability, assuming that firms are expected profit maximizers. In this paper, we test this hypothesis with a series of laboratory experiments.

We explore the effects of different enforcement mechanisms, including formal (external), informal (local), and both together, on individual compliance behavior under a system of territorial use rights in fisheries (TURFs).

We study the compliance behavior of artisanal fishermen in central-southern Chile. Our empirical analysis explores the role of individual morality, perception of legitimacy, and peer effects as determinant factors in the decision to violate regulations. We control for potential simultaneity bias in the peer effects variable.

Our results find evidence that moral standing, peer effects, and legitimacy considerations are important for fishermen’s compliance decisions. Policy implications to improve compliance with regulations in artisanal fisheries are discussed.

We study the effects of different tax schemes used in fisheries management in combination with an individual transferable quota system. We focus on the effects of taxes on equilibrium quota prices and on violations under the assumption that enforcement to induce compliance is imperfect and costly.

This paper studies the effects of different tax schemes used in fishery management in combination with an Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ) system. It focuses on the effects of taxes on equilibrium quota prices and violations under the assumption that enforcement to induce compliance is imperfect and costly. The use of taxes is motivated by the regulator’s need to recover costs for enforcement activities.

In low-income countries, both nearby local villagers, “insiders”, and non-locals, “outsiders”, extract products from protected forests even though their actions are illegal.

This project will use the tools of experimental economics to study behavioral issues related to both the protection of a common-pool resource from poaching by outsiders, and the enforcement of rules and norms to maintain compliance within a group.  The experiments are motivated by the Chilean abalone (loco) fishery and will be conducted in the field with members of local artisanal fishing organizations.

We analyze the performance of the Federal Industrial Inspection Program operated by the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection (PROFEPA) in Mexico City. We seek to answer three questions: What drives the inspections? What determines non-compliance? And what drives imposition of fines? We use firm-level data that identify certain characteristics of the firms, PROFEPA's inspections, compliance results and fines for all air polluting firms under the Program during the period January 2000–October 2008. We obtain three main results.