New Blog post discussing tools used to certify green credentials of products and investments

The Oxford Business Law Blog published a new post by Luca Enriques (Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Oxford), Alessandro Romano (Assistant Professor of Law, Bocconi University) and Andrew F. Tuch (Professor of Law Washington University in St. Louis) titled ‘Green Gatekeepers’. It will also be published in a forthcoming edition of the Minnesota Law Review.

Professor Enriques, Romano and Tuch show that green gatekeepers constitute an increasingly common tool to certify statements concerning environmental qualities of products and investments. Using hand-coded data on over 450 green gatekeepers, they also show that many of these gatekeepers are opaque, as in many instances they do not even disclose the standards they follow. They propose a framework for regulation based on a classification that allows, first, to identity which green gatekeepers are unlikely to be adequately constrained by reputational mechanisms and, second, to discern instances in which policymakers might be able to craft appropriate regulatory responses. From this framework they derive several policy strategies and explore how they may apply to a sample of prominent green gatekeepers.