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 a field 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.
