enterprises compliance with government carbon reduction labelling policy using a system dynamics approach abstract a carbon reduction labelling scheme is an effective policy tool for motivating enterprises or organizations to reduce their life cycle based carbon emissions to benefit the environment this paper uses system dynamics to model enterprises compliance with a combined government policy instrument for a carbon reduction labelling scheme that is government subsidies and economic sanctions a case study of paper enterprises in china is provided to demonstrate the application of the proposed model in which two optional technological plans to reduce the enterprises carbon emissions are examined the technological plans are categorized as a low cost and high cost plan the simulation results show that both the technological plans are vulnerable to the combined policy making and the high cost plan shows superior environmental performance for carbon emissions reduction however the enterprises are more inclined to choose the low cost plan because of superior economic performance the study offers insights to help enterprises select optimal actions on carbon emissions reduction and to inform government of possible sustainable policy design to promote low carbon development the model limitations are discussed as a basis for further improvements in low carbon development

the message in weekly exchange rates in the european monetary system mean reversion conditional heteroscedasticity and jumps weekly rates of the european monetary system ems vis a vis the deutsche mark from april 1979 to march 1991 are modeled as a combined ma 1 garch 1 1 jump process the moving average ma part accounts for mean reversion required for the rates to stay inside the target zone the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity garch part accounts for changing volatility whereas the jump process models parity changes and other erratic movements using an adjusted pearson chi squared goodness of fit test we find similar results for the bernoulli and the poisson jump processes in those cases in which the bernoulli normal distribution does not pass the goodness of fit test a mixture of three normals does finally the ma 1 garch 1 1 bernoulli jump models are jointly estimated assuming a constant contemporaneous correlation matrix for the disturbances and a common jump probability for all the currencies

a survey on the impediments to low carbon technology investment of the petrochemical industry in korea abstract responding to the climate change korea has been establishing a domestic policy framework for promoting energy saving and greenhouse gases reduction with the expansion of low carbon technologies for industry as a key area this paper analyzes investment barriers for low carbon technology investment and suggests supportive policies based on a survey to petrochemical companies in korea a total of 35 samples were collected among which 32 companies are targeted by the korean domestic emission trading scheme and represent 63 of the total co 2 emissions of all petrochemical companies under this scheme the analysis result indicates that low carbon technology introduction is not a priority for the sampled companies besides the lack of financial support there exist other impediments to low carbon technology investment e g lower investment priority economic loss during new technology replacement technology uncertainty and less pressure on energy prices in addition technology payback period acceptable for companies was estimated by the multi bounded discrete choice method the acceptable payback period on the part of half samples ranges from 2 4 to 3 6 years the relatively high preference to short term profitability of low carbon technologies may hinder the companies to make the investment decision financial support and information dissemination for low carbon technologies may be useful to facilitate company s investment in low carbon technologies carbon pricing policies such as emission trading scheme is agreed to be supportive by providing the price signal for the investment this analysis enhances the understating of korean company s perception on low carbon technology investment and provides meaningful policy implications for the development and improvement of related policies

political competition as an obstacle to judicial independence evidence from russia and ukraine a large literature attributes independent courts to intense political competition existing theories however have a previously unrecognized boundary condition they apply only to consolidated democracies this article proposes a strategic pressure theory of judicial in dependence in electoral democracies which posits that intense political competition magnifies the benefits of subservient courts to incumbents thus reducing rather than increasing judicial independence the theory s predictions are tested through quantitative analysis of electoral registration disputes adjudicated by russian and ukrainian courts during the 2002 2003 parliamentary campaigns selection models show that in ukraine progovernment candidates have a higher than average probability of winning in court whereas in russia the political affiliation of the plaintiff does not predict success at trial thus the data show that judicial independence is lower in the more competitive electoral democracy ukraine than in the less comp

out of sample comparison of copula specifications in multivariate density forecasts we introduce a statistical test for comparing the predictive accuracy of competing copula specifications in multivariate density forecasts based on the kullback leibler information criterion klic the test is valid under general conditions in particular it allows for parameter estimation uncertainty and for the copulas to be nested or non nested monte carlo simulations demonstrate that the proposed test has satisfactory size and power properties in finite samples applying the test to daily exchange rate returns of several major currencies against the us dollar we find that the student s t copula is favored over gaussian gumbel and clayton copulas this suggests that these exchange rate returns are characterized by symmetric tail dependence

a comprehensive review of the evolving and cumulative nature of eco innovation in the chemical industry different bodies of literature have attempted to explain what factors and events drive industries throughout processes of environmental change the latter is a gradual historical process of evolution from lower to higher degrees of development based on concepts derived from evolutionary economics greening technological progress and resource based view of the firm this article informs the sustainability transitions literature by providing an account of the evolution in the chemical industry s striving for the design use and production of environmentally sound chemical processes and products based upon eco innovation a conceptual model was elaborated depicting five stages of environmental change in the chemical industry in the period 1901 2030 the authors empirically tested this model by conducting a longitudinal computer aided content analysis of 255 documents addressing different environmental and innovation aspects in this industry in the same period of time the results of this article advance our modern understanding of the different stages of evolution of the chemical industry in terms of environmental change consistent with the conceptual model hitherto presented the findings of this article highlight a number cumulative of factors that enabled the evolution of the chemical industry throughout time supporting eco innovation highlighting the intertwined nature of regulation innovation and technological change it is plausible that the future development of this industry might be shaped by the policy driven paradigms of sustainability and resource efficiency 2015 the authors

joint price and volumetric risk in wind power trading a copula approach abstract this paper examines the dependence between wind power production and electricity prices and discusses its implications for the pricing and the risk distributions associated with contracts that are exposed to joint price and volumetric risk we propose a copula model for the joint behavior of prices and wind power production which is estimated to data from the danish power market we find that the marginal behavior of the individual variables is best described by arma garch models with non gaussian error distributions and the preferred copula model is a time varying gaussian copula as an application of our joint model we consider the case of an energy trading company entering into longer term agreements with wind power producers where the fluctuating future wind power production is bought at a predetermined fixed price we find that assuming independence between prices and wind power production leads to an underestimation of risk as the profit distribution becomes left skewed when the negative dependence that we find in the data is accounted for by performing a simple static hedge in the forward market we show that the risk can be significantly reduced furthermore an out of sample study shows that the choice of copula influences the price of correlation risk and that time varying copulas are superior to the constant ones when comparing actual profits generated with different models

the role of corporate reputation and employees values in the uptake of energy efficiency in office buildings although office market actors in the united kingdom show a growing interest in energy efficiency the pace of takeup of energy efficient office features is slow previous studies have highlighted the roles of limited direct financial costs and benefits efficiency gaps and market barriers in limiting the rate of technology adoption this study provides further evidence on the importance of these factors but the primary contribution is focused on the role of corporate reputation and on the importance of individuals values in shaping corporate behaviour the paper presents a theoretical framework to explain environmental decision making in firms and we present qualitative evidence drawing from sixteen semi structured individual and group interviews with office market stakeholders in london glasgow and edinburgh the research finds that companies despite gradually becoming more energy conscious still regard energy costs as a negligible part of their business costs nevertheless an increasingly important driver is the reputational gain obtained by corporate businesses implementing sustainable practices all the interviewees agreed that the pace of change in the office market is slow and that only further policy interventions will accelerate it

on addressing the dual and embedded nature of business and the route towards corporate sustainability abstract this article argues for greater attention to be paid to the dual and embedded nature of business we propose that a more inclusive systemic perspective is needed for the challenge of speeding up the application of inclusive corporate sustainability the key question is how an on going upward dynamic of transformative learning cycles can be achieved in practice the current practice of implementing sustainability management systems identifying key performance indicators reporting on sustainability policies and outcomes has a strong focus on the physical dynamics in companies and in the good cases in their value chain in many cases the three dimensions of issues time and place are only addressed partially we argue that the academic community needs to pay greater retro and prospective attention to the social intervention dynamics introducing checks on the assumed effects of social interventions in order to achieve a more balanced and inclusive corporate sustainability we need to link levels of the achievement of corporate sustainability goals more strongly with self assessment of the social dynamics in firms and their societal system

government interventions in sustainable supply chain governance experience in dutch front running cases numerous multi actor governance systems have recently emerged ensuring sustainability of international traded products business and civil society actors play a dominant role in initiating and governing sustainable supply chain governance systems sscg systems within specific product markets we see the emergence of various competing sscg systems this has led to debates on effectiveness transparency and legitimacy of these forms of self governance in the market these developments also call for a debate on appropriate roles for national governments most of the academic literature in this field focuses on methodologies for supply chain governance and their impacts but hardly addresses the roles taken on by governments and effectiveness of possible government interventions this article combines analysis of market dynamics in the timber and coffee product chains with policy analysis integrating approaches from the research fields of sustainable business and policy analysis the article shows how competition between various sustainable supply chain governance systems in the netherlands has resulted in recent market breakthroughs while initially government interventions were very limited and diverse the article suggests an approach for more systematic analysis of these dynamics and the roles of various actors by identifying both the public policy cycle and the private policy cycle

the limited political influence of ecological economics a case study on dutch environmental policies abstract although the ecological economics ee discourse attempts to influence environmental policy empirical studies have concluded that its success in this endeavour has been limited thus far in the netherlands however two ee related policy concepts environmental utilisation space and ecological footprint were strongly present in environmental policy during certain periods in time but subsequently disappeared from the environmental agenda the central question of this article is how these ups and downs of the ee concepts can be understood which factors determine their rise on and fall from the policy agenda over time to answer this question this article offers a conceptual model informed by the approaches in political science on framing agenda setting and knowledge utilisation we conclude that the interplay of concept specific characteristics the formation of coalitions around the concept and contextual variables explain the rise and fall of the aforementioned concepts a match between the dominant policy frame and the core elements of the concept provides the opportunity for the two concepts to be pushed on the agenda we observe the alternation of constraining frames which allows for ee concepts to survive and reconciling frames which block agenda entrance for ee concepts furthermore the alternation of these frames seems to correlate with economic and public environmental attention cycles in the netherlands

the copula garch model of conditional dependencies an international stock market application abstract modeling the dependency between stock market returns is a difficult task when returns follow a complicated dynamics when returns are non normal it is often simply impossible to specify the multivariate distribution relating two or more return series in this context we propose a new methodology based on copula functions which consists in estimating first the univariate distributions and then the joining distribution in such a context the dependency parameter can easily be rendered conditional and time varying we apply this methodology to the daily returns of four major stock markets our results suggest that conditional dependency depends on past realizations for european market pairs only for these markets dependency is found to be more widely affected when returns move in the same direction than when they move in opposite directions modeling the dynamics of the dependency parameter also suggests that dependency is higher and more persistent between european stock markets

the evolution of dutch environmental policy the changing ecological arena from 1970 2000 and beyond abstract dutch environmental policies over the past thirty years have expanded through three distinct phases these policies gradually opened up to engage stakeholders in establishing legislation formulating implementation plans and finally jointly defining ecological objectives environmental policies became increasingly effective by ensuring the taking on of environmental responsibilities by a growing number of stakeholders four unresolved issues present a formidable agenda for environmental policy attention in the next decade managing co 2 emissions controlling future infrastructure development minimising resources use and reducing the burden on biodiversity these issues relate to the necessary management of stocks of energy other non renewable resources space and biodiversity respectively up to now the issue of the preservation of stocks has not received much policy attention they are expected to become the new policy issues complementing the traditional emission reduction policies which mainly aim at safeguarding the quality of air water and soil it is argued that super optimizing policies engaging jointly economic social and ecological interests are needed to resolve the issues at stake

the relationship between enterprise efficiency in resource use and energy efficiency practices adoption abstract the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between enterprise efficiency in resource use and the adoption of energy efficiency practices recommended by the us department of energy doe through the industrial assessment center iac using non parametric techniques such as data envelopment analysis dea and parametric techniques like stochastic frontier analysis sfa and corrected ordinary least square cols to measure the efficiency the regression quantile rq is carried out to test the hypothesis that the most efficient companies have adopted a higher level of practice the main conclusion is that when the enterprise operates at increasing returns to scale rts the impact of efficiency on adoption increases positively inversely when the enterprise operates at decreasing rts the impact of efficiency on adoption increases negatively

to reform or to retain politicians incentives to clean up corrupt courts in hybrid regimes this article offers a novel take on the problem of judicial independence in nondemocracies some scholars hold that political fragmentation leads to more judicial independence others argue that it

determinants of pollution abatement in developing countries evidence from south and southeast asia abstract developing countries pa ticularly those in asia are fast adopting industrial pollution control standards similar to those in developed countries formal regulation has been greatly hampered however by the absence of clear and legally binding regulations limited institutional capacity lack of appropriate equipment and trained personnel and inadequate information on emissions one would predict highly pollution intensive production under such conditions our research however has uncovered strongly contradictory evidence despite weak or nonexistent formal regulation there are many clean plants in the developing countries of south and southeast asia of course there are also many plants which are among the world s most serious polluters what explains such extreme interplant variation this paper reviews evidence drawn from three empirical studies of plant level abatement practices conducted 1992 1994 the analyses test the importance of plant characteristics economic considerations and external pressure in determining environmental performance the results consistently show that pollution intensity is negatively associated with scale productive efficiency and the use of new process technology it is strongly and positively associated with public ownership but foreign ownership has no significant effect once other plant characteristics are taken into account among external sources of pressure community action or informal regulation emerges as a clear source of interplant differences in all three studies the results suggest that local income and education are powerful predictors of the effectiveness of informal regulation they also show that existing formal regulation has measurably beneficial effects even when it is quite weakly developed

a survey study of energy saving activities of industrial companies in the republic of korea abstract this study measures industrial energy saving activities esas in the republic of korea and identifies their determinant factors by a questionnaire survey to the energy intensive companies more than 90 of the samples have practiced the institutional and managerial esas requiring relatively lower costs and efforts although the companies have felt strong pressures from the governmental regulations and recognized the importance of industrial associations the externally coercive normative and mimetic factors still indicate no significant influence on their esas at present as internal factors the willingness for energy saving support from top management and internal training specific for energy saving determine a company s practice level of esas economic incentives like financial subsidies are useful for encouraging the company s involvement in esas korean government shall also provide more technical support to the companies particularly the small and medium sized ones for enhancing their capacities in promptly reacting to the newly initiated mandatory regulations on industrial energy efficiency

the intermediary role of an industry association in policy making processes the case of the dutch paper and board industry in the policy making process concerning energy and environmental issues cooperation between government and firms is a means to create a more efficient energy and environmental policy intermediary organizations can play an important role in this policy making process aim of this study is to get insight into the role of one specific intermediary organization the industry association in this paper we focus on the dutch paper and board industry important policy themes for this industry are waste water waste and energy efficiency we distinguished four types of governmental policy instruments top down regulation interactive regulation negative economic instruments and positive economic instruments we analyzed the role of the industry association in the policy making process for all of these four instruments the results clearly show different relative roles of the industry association in different steps of the policy making processes and for different types of instruments

the options of local authorities for addressing climate change and energy efficiency through environmental regulation of companies abstract environmental regulation of companies is sometimes in the literature characterised as a successive broadening of focus and policy instruments from applying command and control mechanism to get companies to clean and or dilute local pollutants through end of pipe solutions towards applying various means to influence and facilitate companies to act proactively in preventing pollution through cleaner production waste prevention and resource efficiency this understanding is contested in this article the article documents instead a gap in respect to the local authorities actual execution of the direct regulation of companies in denmark the practice of the local competent authorities is found to primarily still target local environmental concerns by command and control means the objective of the article is to analyse this discrepancy between the overall representation of regulatory trends and the actual practices of local authorities in denmark the overall constraints that local authorities encounter are investigated in respect to 1 addressing energy efficiency and reduction of ghg emissions through juridical requirements in permits and injunctions and 2 facilitating and promoting reductions of energy consumption and ghg emissions during inspections the assessment is based on the triangulation of different data a qualitative interviews with environmental officers from seven local authorities taking part in a eu life project carbon 20 b a documentary review of political documents and evaluations of the danish regulations as well as c an interview and subsequent correspondence with an employee at the danish environmental protection agency

managing volumetric risk of long term power purchase agreements abstract a negative dependence between wind power production and electricity spot price exists this is an important fact to consider for risk management of long term power purchase agreements ppas in this study we investigate this dependence by constructing a joint model using constant as well as time varying copulas we propose to use score driven models as marginal model for the spot price of electricity as these are more robust to extreme events compared to arma garch models we apply the new model to pricing and risk management of ppas and benchmark it against the arma garch specification our comparison shows that the score driven model results in a statistically significant improvement of predicting the value at risk var which is of high importance for risk management of long term ppas further comparing constant and time varying copulas we find that all time varying copulas are significantly better than their constant counterparts at predicting the var hence time varying copulas should be used in risk management of ppas

barriers to increasing energy efficiency evidence from small and medium sized enterprises in china abstract this paper analyzes financial informational and organizational barriers to energy efficiency investments for small and medium sized enterprises smes in china its findings are based on a survey of 480 smes in zhejiang province and complemented by semi structured interviews with enterprises contained in the survey sample responses reveal that only a minority of smes in china actively perform energy saving activities at a significant level the survey data suggest further that informational barriers are the core bottleneck inhibiting energy efficiency improvements in china s sme sector financial and organizational barriers also influence a company s energy saving activities with interview based evidence stronger than statistical evidence the interviews point out three additional barriers to energy saving activities the role of family ownership structures lax enforcement of government regulations and the absence of government support as well as a lack of skilled labor more than 40 of enterprises in the sample declared themselves unaware of energy saving equipment or practices in their respective business area indicating that there are high transaction costs for smes to gather assess and apply information about energy saving potentials and relevant technologies one policy implication of the study is that the chinese government could play a more active role in fostering the dissemination of energy efficiency related information in the sme sector

to invest or insure how authoritarian time horizons impact foreign aid effectiveness in this article the author argues that the time horizon a dictator faces affects his incentives over the use of aid in three ways first dictators have a greater incentive to invest in public goods when they have a long time horizon second dictators with short time horizons often face the threat of challengers to the regime this leads them to forgo investment and instead consume state resources in two forms that harm growth repression and private pay offs to political opponents third dictators with short time horizons have a strong incentive to secure personal wealth as a form of insurance in case the regime falls using panel data on dictatorships in 71 developing countries from 1961 to 2001 the author finds that time horizons have a positive impact on aid effectiveness foreign aid is associated with positive growth when dictators face long time horizons and negative growth when time horizons are short

energy demand and supply energy policies and energy security in the republic of korea abstract the republic of korea rok has enjoyed rapid economic growth and development over the last 30 years rapid increases in energy use especially petroleum natural gas and electricity and especially in the industrial and transport sectors have fueled the rok s economic growth but with limited fossil fuel resources of its own the result has been that the rok is almost entirely dependent on energy imports the article that follows summarizes the recent trends in the rok energy sector including trends in energy demand and supply and trends in economic demographic and other activities that underlie trends in energy use the rok has been experiencing drastic changes in its energy system mainly induced by industrial supply security and environmental concerns and energy policies in the rok have evolved over the years to address such challenges through measures such as privatization of energy sector activities emphases on enhancing energy security through development of energy efficiency nuclear power and renewable energy and a related focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions the assembly of a model for evaluating energy futures in the rok rok2010 leap is described and results of several policy based scenarios focused on different levels of nuclear energy utilization are described and their impacts on of energy supply and demand in the rok through the year 2030 are explored along with their implications for national energy security and long term policy plans nuclear power continues to hold a crucial position in the rok s energy policy but aggressive expansion of nuclear power alone even if possible given post fukushima global concerns will not be sufficient to attain the rok s green economy and greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals

are benefits from oil stocks diversification gone new evidence from a dynamic copula and high frequency data abstract oil is perceived as a good diversification tool for stock markets to fully understand this potential we propose a new empirical methodology that combines generalized autoregressive score copula functions with high frequency data and allows us to capture and forecast the conditional time varying joint distribution of the oil stocks pair accurately our realized garch with time varying copula yields statistically better forecasts of the dependence and quantiles of the distribution relative to competing models employing a recently proposed conditional diversification benefits measure that considers higher order moments and nonlinear dependence from tail events we document decreasing benefits from diversification over the past ten years the diversification benefits implied by our empirical model are moreover strongly varied over time these findings have important implications for asset allocation as the benefits of including oil in stock portfolios may not be as large as perceived

exploring new ways of assessing the effect of regulation on environmental management abstract studies indicate that while a variety of factors positively influence voluntary environmental management regulatory pressures are among the most important however most research examines samples representing large manufacturers or single industries essentially assuming a level of regulatory constraint using a sample of heterogeneous facilities this study finds that facilities can be classified according to the level of regulatory constraint and that group membership impacts the choice of environmental management strategy when assessed within a utility maximization framework more extensively regulated facilities implement more individual environmental management practices but participate in fewer formal voluntary environmental programs veps compared to other facilities

affordability of energy cost increases for korean companies due to market based climate policies a survey study by sector this paper estimates the affordability of energy cost increases for energy intensive companies due to the introduction of market based climate policies in korea data were collected from 62 respondents from iron steel cement and petrochemical industries over 90 of which are under control of the target management scheme an ongoing mandatory system limiting the greenhouse gases ghg emissions of large energy consuming entities the affordable energy cost increase was estimated using the multiple bounded discrete choice mbdc format results of which show that a mean energy cost increase of 2 6 is acceptable for all the entities sampled companies from the three sectors had similar affordability with an average acceptable energy cost increase of 2 5e2 8 the affordable policy induced energy cost in creases equate to carbon prices of 2500e4000 krw t co2 about 2 3e3 5 usd t co2 for the companies surveyed econometric analysis confirmed a strong correlation between energy price level and company ownership with cost affordability with a view to developing carbon tax policy and a domestic ghg emissions trading scheme in korea this research provides a basis from an industrial perspective for carbon pricing

sustainable development and entrepreneurship past contributions and future directions this article discusses the emerging research concerned with sustainable development and entrepreneurship which is the focus of this special issue of the journal of business venturing entrepreneurship has been recognized as a major conduit for sustainable products and processes and new ventures are being held up as a panacea for many social and environmental concerns however there remains considerable uncertainty regarding the nature of entrepreneurship s role and how it may unfold we begin with an overview of sustainable development and the role of entrepreneurship and outline recent contributions exploring this role we then summarize the papers presented in this special issue and conclude with suggestions for further research

the transition to the sustainable enterprise abstract the sustainable enterprise is entering a new phase private enterprise engages in a shift from environmentally friendly production methods towards true sustainable entrepreneurship dealing both with quality and volume aspects of natural capital corporate governance changes at two levels first the internal governance of the firm alters as new environmental preservation demands come forward secondly the external governance of the firm changes as new initiatives need to be employed to ensure adequate and sustainable social technological and infrastructural conditions for production it is argued that the preservation of non reproducible key stocks of energy biodiversity and space requires new and special attention in the strategic management of the sustainable enterprise also it is shown that evolving ethical values of intergenerational equity demand a timely transition to new business practices finally a program for governments and enterprises to enhance progress towards the next stage of sustainable entrepreneurship is presented