TY  - BOOK
AU  - Toffel, Michael W.
AU  - Short, Jodi L.
TI  - Coming Clean and Cleaning Up: does Voluntary Self-Reporting Indicate Effective Self-Policing?
SN  - 00222186
AV  - HB73 JOU 
PY  - 2011///
CY  - Chicago
PB  - University of Chicago Press
KW  - Auditing policies
KW  - Commercial regulation
KW  - Economic regulation
KW  - Environmental agencies
KW  - Government regulation
KW  - Industrial regulation
KW  - Modeling
KW  - Regulation compliance audits
KW  - Securities and Exchange Commission regulation
N2  - Regulatory agencies are increasingly establishing voluntary self-reporting programs both as an investigative tool and to encourage regulated firms to commit to policing themselves. We investigate whether voluntary self-reporting can reliably indicate effective self-policing efforts that might provide opportunities for enforcement efficiencies. We find that regulators used self-reports of legal violations as a heuristic for identifying firms that are effectively policing their own operations, shifting enforcement resources away from those that voluntarily disclose. We also find that these firms that voluntarily disclosed regulatory violations and committed to self-policing improved their regulatory compliance and environmental performance, which suggests that the enforcement relief they received was warranted. Collectively, our results suggest that self-reporting can be a useful tool for reliably identifying and leveraging the voluntary self-policing efforts of regulated companies
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1086/658494
ER  -