Coming Clean: Information Disclosure and Environmental Performance
Michael E. Kraft, Mark Stephan, and Troy D. Abel
Abstract
This book investigates the process of information disclosure as a policy strategy for environmental protection. The process, which is a new approach to environmental protection, sometimes leads government and industry to focus on meeting only minimal standards. The authors examine the effectiveness of information disclosure in achieving improvements in corporate environmental performance by analyzing data from the federal government’s Toxics Release Inventory, or TRI, and drawing on an original set of survey data from corporations and federal, state, and local officials, among other sources. T ... More
This book investigates the process of information disclosure as a policy strategy for environmental protection. The process, which is a new approach to environmental protection, sometimes leads government and industry to focus on meeting only minimal standards. The authors examine the effectiveness of information disclosure in achieving improvements in corporate environmental performance by analyzing data from the federal government’s Toxics Release Inventory, or TRI, and drawing on an original set of survey data from corporations and federal, state, and local officials, among other sources. The authors find that TRI, a prime example of information disclosure, has had a substantial effect over time on the environmental performance of industry. When examining case studies from all over the United States, the conclusion is that improvement is not uniform: some facilities perform much better than others. The authors argue that information disclosure plays an important role in environmental policy—but only as part of an integrated set of policy tools that includes conventional regulation.
Keywords:
Toxics Release Inventory,
survey data,
corporations,
federal officials,
state officials,
local officials,
industry,
case studies,
conventional regulation
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780262014953 |
| Published to MIT Press Scholarship Online: August 2013 |
DOI:10.7551/mitpress/9780262014953.001.0001 |
