This field experiment investigates the effect of first-time inspections of restaurants' waste sorting and explores whether motivational interviewing (MI) training of inspectors in this specific setting enhances the propensity of restaurants to be compliant with regulations. Our results show strong positive effects of first inspections with an average improvement of 55%. Also, the MI training of inspectors seems to affect compliance. However, this may also be a combined effect of the first inspection, MI training and more days between inspections. Further research is needed.

High hygienic standards are essential to avoid the spread of infectious diseases, not least in environments with many children. This paper uses an experimental design to examine the impact of feedback information following a public health safety inspection on future behavior of pre-schools in three Swedish municipalities. We find no effects of information at the municipality level. However, we find that pre-schools that were informed about a bad result improved more than comparable pre-schools that received no feedback. Conversely, informed pre-schools with a good result worsened their results compared to similarly performing uninformed pre-schools. Our results thus lend support to the so called boomerang effect.

In this study we report how the communicative method “Motivational Interviewing” (MI) is adapted to the context of health safety inspections. The principal aim is to analyze the effect of MI training on inspectors’ communicative skills and to discuss the outcome in relation to a previous study that involved training of inspectors in a broader context. A further aim of this study is to explore whether it is possible to establish an effect of MI-trained inspectors on property owners’ compliance with the request for reporting radon gas radiation measurement results.

Målsättningen har varit att ta fram ny kunskap inom miljötillsynen och därigenom uppnå en effektivare miljötillsyn samt att få in nya vetenskapliga perspektiv på miljötillsyn.

I rapporten studeras metoder för inspektioner och det kommunikativa samspelet mellan inspektören och företrädare för den verksamhet som inspekteras, hur den institutionella ramen för inspektionsprocessen fungerar samt visar på möjligheter att mäta effekterna av inspektioner och tillsyn.

Naturvårdsverket kommer att ha resultatet som ett kunskapsunderlag i fortsatt arbete med tillsynsvägledning och utveckling av hur tillsyn och tillsynsvägledning kan följas upp och utvärderas.

The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (Naturvårdsverket) has financed the interdisciplinary research program “Efficient Environmental Inspections and Enforcement” (“Effektiv miljötillsyn”). The researchers are affiliated to Stockholm University, which is the responsible research institution, the Royal Institute of Technology (Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan), the Karolinska Institutet, and the Swedish Defense Research Agency (Totalförsvarets forskningsinstitut). The goal has been to develop new knowledge, thereby achieving more efficient environmental inspections and enforcement and obtaining new scientific perspectives on environmental inspections and enforcement.

The report studies methods for inspections and the communication between the inspector and the representative of the inspected facility, how the institutional framework for the inspection process works, and demonstrates the possibilities of measuring the effects of inspections and enforcement. The researchers involved in the program are fully responsible for the content of this report.

The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency will use the results as a base for its continuing efforts to improve inspection and enforcement guidance and to develop the following up and evaluation of inspections and enforcement and guidance.

In spite of the increase in domestic law enforcement policies in the U.S. drug related crime has followed a non-monotonic trend and cocaine and heroin prices, instead of increasing, have been dropping or remained stable over time. All this in a context of an increase in these drugs’ consumption during the 1980s and a small decrease during the 1990s. This paper provides an explanation to these counter-intuitive effects of domestic law enforcement policies. We model how drug lords respond to this type of policy within a conflict framework over the control of distribution activities for illegal drugs, which is novel. The model predicts drug distribution activities, drug prices and drug consumption. These predictions appear to be consistent with the empirical evidence in the United States.

This paper demonstrates how the analysis can differ dramatically between two common static modeling approaches to conflict. The first approach uses a one-period setup and associates positive arms investments with conflict. The second approach has two periods, where arming decisions are taken in the first period, and the decision on whether to go to war is taken separately in the second. Building on the latter approach, I introduce a repeated game protocol with myopic players. Under these circumstances countries may end up in cycles of war and peace. This result offers a novel explanation for a common pattern in history.