Thomas Blondiau & Sandra Rousseau, The impact of the judicial objective function on the enforcement of environmental standards, Journal of Regulatory Economics 2010, vol. 37(2), 196-214
The authors investigate the influence of a judge’s objective function on the type of sanctions used to enforce environmental standards and focus on the difference between monetary and non-monetary penalties. Therefore, they examine the extent to which judges take social costs of sanctions into account when judging environmental violations. Furthermore, they conduct an empirical analysis to test the main findings of the theoretical model using court data from several Belgian jurisdictions. They find evidence that besides deterrence judges also take the social costs of sanctions into account in their decision-making.
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