TIME, CAPITAL INTENSITY, AND THE COST OF FISHING EFFORT

The notion that a fishing vessel's costs are a function of its "effort" is a useful paradigm in fishery analysis. This paper elaborates on this micro theoretic approach, and proposes a way to view the cost of effort relation as the interaction of capital intensity decisions and the length of the fishing season. The model indicates that capital intensity decisions are affected by season closures, and that season closures can be used to redistribute wealth among different classes of fishermen.Production Economics, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Environmental Violations, Legal Penalties, and Reputation Costs

This paper examines the sizes and determinants of fines, damage awards, remediation costs, and market value losses imposed on companies that violate environmental laws. We find that legal penalties are not significantly related to firm size, indicating no support for views that large companies face unusually small legal penalties. In fact, we can explain very little of the cross-sectional variation in legal penalties, lending support to arguments that such penalties are highly variable and unpredictable. On average, firms violating environmental laws suffer statistically significant losses in the market value of firm equity. The losses are of similar magnitude to the legal penalties imposed, indicating that legal penalties, and not reputational losses, are most important in disciplining and deterring environmental violations

The SEC\u27s Misguided Climate Disclosure Rule Proposal

The following article adapts and consolidates two comment letters submitted last spring by a group of twenty-two professors of finance and law on the SEC’s proposed climate change disclosure rules. The professors reiterate their recommendation that the SEC withdraw its proposal as legally misguided, while outlining some of the issues that the proposal will face when challenged in court