Publication Date

2025

Abstract

Regulators have long faced the challenge of enforcing extensive legal requirements with resources that are wildly inadequate to the task. Even in the most hospitable legal and political climate, it is inherently difficult for regulators to deploy sufficient resources to monitor and enforce compliance with broad statutory mandates and extensive bodies of rules. Legal and political hostility to regulation further diminishes regulators' capacity to enforce the law. In contexts where legal requirements far outstrip an agency's enforcement capacity, regulators must wrestle with the question of whether it is possible to persuade regulated individuals and entities to comply with law when they face vanishingly low odds of being the target of enforcement activity.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) faced this question in its attempts to motivate compliance with under-enforced rules that require building contractors to certify their adherence to lead paint safety measures. EPA staff partnered with the authors to address this question through afield experiment testing the relative efficacy of different messaging strategies to motivate contractors to comply. We compared the relative efficacy of punitive messaging against more positive and cooperative messaging strategies. Contrary to influential scholarship touting the compliance benefits of cooperative approaches to regulation, we found that the punitive, deterrence-based message produced the greatest compliance gains overall even though regulators devoted no new resources to enforcement. Our findings yield important insights for regulators trying to do more with less.

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Ecology Law Quarterly

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