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Bruce Yandle's intellectual curiosity led him to leave a fifteen-year career in the industrial machinery business and start a new career in academia that is already twice as long. The unifying interest of his academic work has been to answer the question: How did human social development lead to markets and how do markets evolve? That quickly led him to the investigation of property rights and rules of law.
Yandle has authored and edited 14 books, including Common Law and Common Sense for the Environment(Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), which integrates the rule of law into the operation of markets for environmental resources. This book begins with the problem of the commons, where resources are exploited on a first-come, first-serve basis, and ends with markets for water quality, where wealth is created and the environment is protected.
Among his numerous articles, Yandle's "Bootleggers and Baptists: The Education of a Regulatory Economist," has become a classic. In this article he explains why two seemingly incompatible groups can join forces to achieve the same political goal. One group provides a public argument with moral appeal. The other group has an economic interest and gives inconspicuous support to the cause. For example, the Kyoto Protocol mobilized environmentalists and producers of natural gas to impose restrictions on coal burning activities. These were joined by members of the European Union who lobbied against market approaches for limiting emissions, when those approaches were used by other countries. (The EU favored market approaches within their own family of countries.) Kyoto provided a framework that enabled some energy producers to raise competitors' cost and for some countries to gain advantages in international trade. Yandle's insight illustrates why it can be so difficult to make sensible changes to environmental laws.
Yandle's most recent work involves a survey of research that focuses on the relationship between income and environmental quality. At preset there are more than 100 empirical studies for nations and regions examining this relationship. Out of this body of work has come the "Environmental Kuznets Curve", a relationship that shows how the trade-off made between income and environmental quality changes as income increases. When national incomes are very low, people trade off environmental quality for income. But a point is reached where income and environmental quality improve together. These findings illustrate the importance to environmental quality of policies that expand trade and improve economic well being.
Yandle is interim dean of Clemson University's College of Business & Behavioral Science and professor of economics emeritus at Clemson. He is also a faculty member with George Mason University's Capitol Hill Campus. He has served as executive director of the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C. He was a visiting professor at the Montpellier University Law School in France and has lectured in Germany and Italy.
Yandle and his wife have three children and five grandchildren. He admits to being a workaholic with little time for hobbies, but he does enjoy restoring his century-old country house in Round Oak, Georgia. Articles Much Ado about Pigou
(March 2010) NAFTA, Environmental Kuznets Curves, and Mexico’s Progress
(September 2009) Thoughts on the Relative Merits of Cap-and-Trade versus Emission Taxes for Controlling Carbon Emissions.
(May 2009) Bootleggers, Baptists, and the Global Warming Battle
(January 2002) Opeds Not the time to cap and trade
(January 2010) Harnessing Markets to Improve Water Quality: Using a free-market approach can save money and reduce pollution
(March 1999) Policy Series Regulation by Litigation -- The Diesel Engine Episode (No. 25)
(September 2002) Bootleggers, Baptists, and Global Warming (No. 14)
(October 1998) The Common Law: How It Protects the Environment (No. 13)
(May 1998) The Common Law: How it Protects the Environment (full)
(May 1998) Research Studies Environmental Kuznets Curves, Carbon Emissions, and Public Choice
(March 2010) National TV Broadcasting and the rise of the regulatory state
(March 2010) Environmental Kuznets Curves: A Review of Findings, Methods, and Policy Implications
(April 2004) The Environmental Kuznets Curve: A Primer
(December 2002) Regulating Air Quality through Litigation: The Diesel Engine Episode
(September 2002) South Carolina's Jocassee Gorges
Private Vice or Public Virtue?
(August 2002) Books By Perc Authors And Editors — Books Agriculture and the Environment
Searching for Greener Pastures
(May 2001) Books Political Economy Forum Series — Books Agricultural Policy and the Environment
(January 2003) The Market Meets the Environment: Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy
(January 1999) Common Sense and Common Law for the Environment
(September 1997) Land Rights: The 1990s Property Rights Rebellion
(June 1995) Taking the Environment Seriously
(January 1993) Environmental Report Cards — Other Publications Executive Summary to the 2004 Report Card on Bush's Environmental Policy
(October 2004) Introduction to the 2004 Report Card on Bush's Environmental Policy (pdf)
(October 2004) Chapter 15 - Water Quality
(October 2004) Features — PERC Reports "Bootleggers, Baptists, and Global Warming" in Retrospect
(June 2010) Markets for Water Quality
(September 2008) A no-regrets carbon reduction policy
(March 2008) Environmentally Responsible
The Bush Administration Could Further Market Approaches
(March 2005) A Mediocre Grade on the Environment
Perc's Mid-term Report Card Gives Bush A C-
(March 2003) Changes in Attitude
(December 2000) Land Trusts or Land Agents?
(December 1999) Common-Law Protection
Curbing Pollution-Case-By-Case
(June 1998) Current Research Yandle's current work focuses on environmental institution builders, those individuals who led the way in organizing such things as river basin associations and other firms that were dedicated to improving environmental quality in cost-effective ways.
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