Environmental Regulation in the Presence of an Informal Sector
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We analyze the efficacy of environmental regulation in the presence of an endogenous informal sector. Firms in an imperfectly competitive formal sector produce a final good using a polluting intermediate good. The firms can either produce the intermediate good or purchase it from a price-taking informal sector. An environmental regulator sets the emission intensity of the intermediate good that all formal sector firms implement honestly but informal sector firms seek, and are sometimes able, to evade. We show that, depending on the stringency of the regulation and its enforcement, the informal sector can act as a source of pollution leakage. Stricter regulation can increase (when the “composition effect” of regulation dominates its “scale effect”) or decrease total pollution, and may even have a non-monotonic impact. Further, price discrimination by the formal sector, when it purchases the intermediate good from the informal sector, can worsen regulatory compliance by the informal sector and lead to lower welfare.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".