environmental regulation and u s economic growth in this article we quantify the costs of pollution controls by reporting the results of simulations of the growth of the u s economy with and without regulation for this purpose we have constructed a detailed model of the economy that includes the determinants of long term growth we have also analyzed the interaction between industries in order to capture the full repercussions of environmental regulations however we have not attempted to assess the benefits resulting from a cleaner environment we find that pollution abatement has emerged as a major claimant on the resources of the u s economy the cost of emission controls is more than 10 of the total cost of government purchases of goods and services

employment and structural impacts of material efficiency strategies results from five case studies abstract in order to come up with a sound assessment of the effects of material efficiency innovations on growth employment and competitiveness different economic mechanisms have to be considered from a methodological point of view the analysis must be able to account for technology specific aspects the employment impacts of five innovations are analyzed plastic and paper recycling increased life span of automobiles car sharing and bio based products time horizons for all strategies are scenarios until 2020 the economic impacts are context specific with regard to innovation technology and country the economic impacts highlight substantial structural adjustments the overall economic net impact on employment tends to be neutral to positive stronger positive economic impacts result if first mover advantages can be established

rethinking the optimal level of environmental quality justifications for strict environmental policy abstract traditional environmental theory suggests that the optimal level of a pollution emission occurs when the marginal damage created by the emissions is equal to the marginal cost of reducing the emissions we argue that the benefits from reducing pollution should be much more broadly defined to include at least three other sources of benefits first we develop a game theoretic model in which firms may under invest in cost saving green technologies second we demonstrate that consideration of future damages and abatement costs leads to a lower current optimal pollution level than that obtained in traditional models finally we show that ecological complexity creates indirect pathways by which greater pollution increases the likelihood of generating irreversible environmental damage this broader definition of the benefits of pollution abatement yields an optimal level of pollution that may actually be less than the level at which conventionally measured marginal damages are equal to marginal abatement costs thus environmental policy should be stricter

the effect of clean water regulation on profitability testing the porter hypothesis previous theoretical research provides opposing arguments regarding the effect of environmental regulation on profitability this study provides empirical evidence on this debated effect by testing the strong version of the porter hypothesis we employ panel data analysis to examine the effect of water regulation as measured by permitted wastewater discharge limits on the profitability of publicly held firms operating within the chemical manufacturing industries we find that tighter water regulation meaningfully lowers profitability by reinterpreting profitability in terms of sales and costs the results demonstrate that tighter water regulation increases costs conditioned on a given level of sales

obstacles to school progression in rural pakistan an analysis of gender and sibling rivalry using field survey data abstract this paper aims to identify the obstacles to school progression by using field surveys that were conducted in twenty five pakistani villages the full information maximum likelihood fiml estimation of the sequential schooling decision model reveals important dynamics of the gender difference in educational attainment intrahousehold resource allocation patterns and transitory income and wealth effects in the descriptive statistics as well as the econometric analyses we find a high educational retention rate and observe that school progression rates between male and female students after secondary school are comparable in particular we find gender specific and schooling stage specific birth order effects on education our overall findings are consistent with the implications of optimal schooling behavior under binding credit constraints and the self selection of education friendly households finally we find serious supply side constraints which might arise from a village level lack of demand for primary schools for girls

environmental policy and competitiveness the porter hypothesis and the composition of capital abstract the porter hypothesis suggests a win win situation in the sense that environmental policy improves both environment and competitiveness the suggestion received strong criticism from economists driven by the idea that if opportunities exist firms do not have to be triggered by an extra cost in this paper a model is developed which confirms this point but which also draws attention to some general mechanisms that relax the trade off considerably downsizing and modernization of firms subject to environmental policy will increase average productivity and will have positive effects on the marginal decrease of profits and environmental damage

vertical structure and strategic environmental trade policy abstract the idea that environmental trade policy can be used to achieve competitive advantage in international markets has important implications for the way we conceive free trade this paper considers strategic environmental policy in a model that makes explicit the vertical structure that supports production of the traded good including intranational vertical relationships in the analysis of strategic environmental trade policy has substantial qualitative effects when vertical contracts are allowed the optimal policy to levy on a polluting input under both quantity and price competition in the international market is the pigouvian tax

tightening environmental standards the benefit cost or the no cost paradigm ms ff ichael porter and claas van der linde have written a paper that is interesting and to us at least somewhat astonishing it is a defense of environmental regulation indeed an invitation to more stringent regulation that makes essentially no reference to the social benefits of such regulation this approach contrasts starkly with the methods that economists and other policy analysts have traditionally used when assessing environmental or other regulatory programs the traditional approach consists of comparing the beneficial effects of regulation with the costs that must be borne to secure these benefits for environmental regulation the social benefits include the reductions in morbidity or premature mortality that can accompany cleaner air the enhanced recreational opportunities that can result from water quality improvements the increased land values that might attend the cleanup of a hazardous waste site the enhanced vitality of aquatic ecosystems that might follow reductions in agricultural pesticide use or any of the other potentially significant benefits associated with tighter standards from this benefit cost approach emerges the standard tradeoff discussed in virtually every economics textbook porter and van der linde deny the validity of this approach to the analysis of environmental regulation claiming it to be an artifact of what they see as a static mindset in their view economists have failed to appreciate the capacity of

does more stringent environmental regulation induce or reduce technology adoption when the rate of technology adoption is inverted u shaped abstract we show that for a broad class of technologies the relationship between policy stringency and the rate of technology adoption is inverted u shaped this happens when the marginal abatement cost mac curves of conventional and new technologies intersect which invariably occurs when emissions are proportional to output and technological progress reduces emissions per output this outcome does not result from policy failure on the contrary in social optimum the relationship between the slope of the marginal damage curve and the rate of technology adoption is also inverted u shaped under more general conditions these curves can look even more complicated e g such as inverted w shaped

strength of protection for geographical indications promotion incentives and welfare effects we address the question of how the strength of protection for geographical indications gis affects the gi industry s promotion incentives equilibrium market outcomes and the distribution of welfare geographical indication producers engage in informative advertising by associating their true quality premium relative to a substitute product with a specific label emphasizing the gi s geographic origin the extent to which the names words of the gi label can be used and or imitated by competing products which depends on the strength of gi protection determines how informative the gi promotion messages can be consumers heterogeneous preferences vis a vis the gi quality premium are modeled in a vertically differentiated framework both the gi industry and the substitute product industry are assumed to be competitive with free entry the model is calibrated and solved for alternative parameter values results show that producers of the gi and of the lower quality substitute good have divergent interests gi producers are better off with full protection whereas the substitute good s producers prefer intermediate levels of protection but they never prefer zero protection because they benefit indirectly if the gi producers incentives to promote are preserved for consumers and aggregate welfare the preferred level of protection depends on the model s parameters with an intermediate level of protection being optimal in many circumstances

distribution of environmental costs and benefits additional distortions and the porter hypothesis the porter hypothesis argues that environmental regulations benefit firms by fostering innovation we discuss four examples consistent with this idea highlighting either the distribution of benefits or costs or the presence of some additional distortion other than pollution examples are organized according to the list of market failures adding any one market failure creates the possibility that firms benefit from regulations while each example can be fully consistent with the porter hypothesis it is also possible that regulations benefit firms even without fostering innovation a result that would be empirically difficult to distinguish from the porter hypothesis

environmental compliance and economic and environmental performance evidence from handicrafts small businesses in mexico this research aims to fill a major gap in the relevant literature on small businesses in developing countries specifically concerning the development of models to better explain economic and environmental performance as a result of environmental compliance thus moving toward an explanation of the sustainable behavior of these businesses data from 186 pottery craft businesses located in three mexican states oaxaca puebla and tlaxcala reveal that environmental compliance significantly influences economic and environmental performance with the mediating role of environmental innovation confirming the porter hypothesis in the context of small businesses in an emerging economy environmental compliance is an important factor in improving the economic and environmental performance of small businesses in emerging economies

the cost of regulation osha epa and the productivity slowdown the slowdown in productivity growth in the u s economy during the 1970 s has been a matter of great concern to policymakers associated as it is with inflation unemployment and declining real wage growth this paper examines the impact on productivity growth of government regulation specifically worker health and safety regulation by the occupational safety and health administration osha and environmental regulation by the environmental protection agency epa looking at data for 450 manufacturing industries between 1958 and 1978 the study finds a large negative relationship between such regulation and productivity growth using these results about 30 percent of the decline in productivity growth in manufacturing during the 1970 s may be attributed to such regulation several previous studies have looked at the contribution of regulation to the productivity slowdown many of these have inferred that the contribution must be small on the basis of the relatively small amount spent on complying with such regulations edward denison 1979 estimates that only about 16 percent of the productivity slowdown in the 1972 75 period was due to regulation 35 percentage points out of a slowdown of 2 17 percentage points paul portney 1981 notes that little of gnp is spent on pollution control under 2 percent concluding that therefore pollution regulations could have little effect on productivity growth norsworthy et al 1979 also find a small impact of pollution abatement capital expenditures on productivity growth studies based on econometric estimation of the regulation productivity relationship have found a wide range of results gregory christainsen and robert haveman 1981 find regulation reduced labor productivity growth by 27 percentage points using time series data and measures of total federal regulation robert crandall 1981 finds a strong relationship between pollution abatement capital and productivity growth but this relationship disappears when a measure of energy intensity is included robin siegel 1979 observes a significant contribution 5 percentage points from pollution control expenditures to the productivity slowdown for 1965 73 but not for later years finally frank gollop and mark roberts 1983 examine data for a set of electric utilities and find that regulation of emissions had a large impact on total factor productivity growth lowering it for regulated firms by 59 percentage points many other factors might help to explain the productivity slowdown including the rise in energy prices the long and severe recession and declines in research and development expenditures there have been a variety of studies examining the contributions of each factor to the slowdown they generally conclude that many factors contributed to the slowdown but that a sizable fraction of the slowdown remains unexplained by the estimated contributions of all the factors considered

a new database on human capital stock in developing and industrial countries sources methodology and results abstract the paper describes the techniques and data adopted for the construction of a new series of estimates of the stock of education in 85 countries over 28 years 1960 1987 the series are built from enrollment data using the perpetual inventory method adjusted for mortality estimates are corrected for grade repetition among school goers and country specific drop out rates for primary and secondary students enrollment data series used start as far back as 1930 for most countries and even earlier for others this reduces the need for backward extrapolation of enrollments to provide the initial estimates of the investment inventory

macro economic and development indexes and iso14001 certificates a cross national analysis abstract environmental management systems emss implemented according to the iso14001 standard have been examined by many authors especially focussing on its impact at the firm level however only a few papers have investigated the impact of iso14001 from a country perspective this paper aims to contribute to bridging this gap the aim is to study the relation between iso14001 growth and the trend in selected macro economic and development indexes by applying the growth mixture model to a panel of 73 countries for the period 1999 2012 we assess the following hypotheses a the increase in numbers of iso14001 certifications corresponds to an increase in economic indexes b the increase in iso14001 corresponds to an increase in development indexes c the trends of iso14001 adoption and macro economic indexes confirm the relationship described by the environmental kuznets curve the results confirm a positive relation among the trends of some variables such as iso14001 and gross domestic product gdp iso14001 and industry value added while no significant results were found when observing the relation between iso14001 and the selected development indexes in addition using the industry added value as the variable to measure economic development our results support the theory of the environmental kuznets curve

the potential of environmental regulation to change managerial perception environmental management competitiveness and financial performance abstract this research presents an overview of where the gaps in the literature exist in relation to the link between environmental regulation and proactive environmental management and competitiveness and incorporates them in a whole model different papers have highlighted only partial aspects of these relationships specifically this research evaluates the relationship between managerial perception and the different styles of environmental regulations command and control versus voluntary norms the mediator role of environmental management in the link between environmental regulations and competitiveness the effect of competitiveness on financial performance and the two way relationship between proactive environmental management and financial performance finally this paper uses statistical evidence to test and estimate causal relationships through a structural equation modelling of 208 firms affected by ippc law in spain there is a lack of systematic statistical evidence on this topic in the literature which mainly focuses on case studies the results show that when environmental regulation stems from command and control legislation its influence on managerial perception and proactive environmental management is not significant however when environmental regulation stems from voluntary norms its effects are positive moreover investment in proactive environmental management contributes to increasing the competitiveness of the firm cost and differentiation competitive advantage have a positive impact on financial performance finally the link between proactive environmental management and financial performance may follow different paths 1 neither direct nor single because it can depend on competitive advantage and 2 direct because there is a significant two way relationship between these variables proactive environmental management influences financial performance and financial performance influences proactive environmental management

international investment location decisions abstract in international location tournaments governments compete for foreign investment with tax and other short run incentives such tournaments can be won if agglomeration economies are sufficiently powerful to overcome investors desire to spread investments as a hedge against risk we focus on manufacturing investments by u s multinationals in the 1980s our econometric results suggest that agglomeration economies are indeed the dominant influence on investor calculations paradoxically short run incentives have limited apparent impact on location choice we conclude that high cost tournament play is unnecessary for countries with good infrastructure development specialized input suppliers and an expanding domestic market

education growth and income inequality estimates of the effect of education on gdp the social return have been hard to reconcile with micro evidence on the private return to schooling we present a simple explanation combining two ideas imperfect substitution and endogenous skill biased technological progress and use cross country panel data on inequality and gdp to test these ideas a one year increase in the level of education reduces the private return by 2 percentage points consistent with katz murphy s 1992 elasticity of substitution we find no evidence for reversal of this initial effect as in acemoglu 2002 in the short run the social return equals the private return

priceless the nonpecuniary benefits of schooling copyright 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 by the american economic association permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of american economic association publications for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation including the name of the author copyrights for components of this work owned by others than aea must be honored abstracting with credit is permitted the author has the right to republish post on servers redistribute to lists and use any component of this work in other works for others to do so requires prior specific permission and or a fee permissions may be requested from the american economic association administrative office by going to the contact us form and choosing copyright permissions request from the menu copyright 2016 aea

environmental innovations and firm profitability unmasking the porter hypothesis we examine impacts of different types of environmental innovations on firm profits following porter s sci am 264 4 168 1991 hypothesis that environmental regulation can improve firms competitiveness we distinguish between regulation induced and voluntary environmental innovations we find that innovations which do not improve firms resource efficiency do not provide positive returns to profitability however innovations that increase a firm s resource efficiency in terms of material or energy consumption per unit of output have a positive impact on profitability this positive result holds for both regulation induced and voluntary innovations although the effect is greater for regulation driven innovation we conclude that the porter hypothesis does not hold in general for its strong version but depends on the type of environmental innovation our findings rest on firm level data from the german part of the community innovation survey 2008 cis 2008

information processing and organizational structure abstract standard economic theories of the firm and other organizations stress profit maximization as the foundation for derivation of predictable behavior yet statistical and case study evidence continues to accumulate that real firms do not act as required by the neoclassical framework instead of being represented by ever more elaborate maximization models the firm can be modeled simply as a network of information processing agents the actions of the firm are then a function only of the network structure and the information processing capabilities of the agents this approach can be used to explain a number of features of organizational behavior including the process of technological diffusion it also suggests that derivation of the optimal organizational structure may be computationally complex with a number of implications for economic theory and policy development

environmental policy and growth when inputs are differentiated in pollution intensity environmental policy affects the distribution of market shares if intermediate goods are differentiated in their pollution intensity when innovations are environment friendly a tax on emissions skews demand towards new goods which are the most productive in this case the tax has to increase along a balanced growth path to keep the market shares of goods of different vintages constant comparing balanced growth paths we find that tightening the policy stance spurs innovation because it increases the market share of recent vintages and promotes environment friendly technological progress as a result the cost of environmental policy in terms of slower growth is weaker

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

environmental justice in the oil refinery industry a panel analysis across united states counties abstract environmental injustice due to economic inequality and its correlates and consequences has been a focus for researchers and policy makers alike over many years with much of that research focusing on race as the major determinant of inequality in this paper we extend this literature by focussing on emissions from the oil refinery industry at the community level in particular based on the use of panel data we analyse econometrically how the environmental performance of individual petroleum refineries emissions of benzene and toluene to the atmosphere associates with determinants of economic inequality at the micro level in terms of average per capita income at the level of united states counties as well as average county level unemployment rates the paper finds evidence of environmental injustice as a result of unemployment levels in areas around refineries and to a slightly lesser extent as a result of income inequality it discusses these results in a wider context referring amongst other things to the role of county level community characteristics and the potential for private firms to substitute for the intervention of public institutions if these are lacking

corporate governance environmental regulations and technological change abstract this paper investigates the relationship between environmental regulations and innovation by focusing on the automobile industry in a cross country setting we provide empirical evidence that the presence of agency problems mitigates the negative effects of environmental regulations on overall r d activity which leads to full compensation when the degree of agency problems is sufficiently high guiding our empirical analysis we provide a general model consistent with the structure of existing ownership data specifically we model ownership structure as a combination of two extreme corporate governance types on the one extreme there are profit maximizers and on the other extreme there are managers who are only concerned with their private benefits the model leads to a simple country level ownership indicator and shows that if an economy is dominated by firms with higher agency problems then pollution tax might even increase overall r d while reducing pollution according to our estimations such an outcome is possible only for out of sample values of the ownership indicator where the degree of agency problems is extremely high

model of efficient and sustainable improvements in a lean production system through processes of environmental innovation abstract globalization has changed the world as well as how a customer judges the value of a product which has created a new business focus different approaches have been oriented on this direction such as the lean manufacturing system and the concept of sustainability however these two notions are not easy to implement simultaneously besides several authors have declared doubts with respect to reaching this target difficulty persists in identifying the tools required and quantifying the improvements achieved this research develops a general approach based on environmental innovation to help firms harmonize efficiency and sustainability the goal is to add extra value to the product which provides the potential to enhance competitiveness in the 21st century globalized market a case study demonstrates that the costs the incomes the social responsibility and the sustainability can be improved when environmental innovation is applied transforming the traditional production system into a lean system

energy the environment and innovation in this paper we review the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of policies in stimulating innovation that is designed to produce greener and more energy efficient technologies first we review the theoretical literature on the role of purely environmental policies in inducing firms to undertake environmental innovation the conclusion is that for a wide range of policies and in a wide range of circumstances one cannot prove that these policies necessarily induce greater innovation we then consider the empirical evidence which suggests that the effect of these policies is weak but that the largest effects come in the long run when through learning by doing firms better understand the scope and potential for new energy efficient technologies finally we consider the design of both environmental and technology policies and show that the interaction of these policies is complex and warrants considerable further research copyright 2002 oxford university press

the effect of within sector upstream and downstream energy taxes on innovation and productivity the aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of environmental regulatory stringency on innovation and productivity using a panel of 8 european countries for 13 manufacturing sectors over the years 2001 2007 this research topic falls under the heading of the porter hypothesis ph of which different versions have been tested we consider both the strong and the weak versions of the ph while also adding some peculiar features to the analysis firstly we assess the role played by environmental taxes that is an instrument rarely tested as a factor which can support the ph secondly we analyse not only the effect of environmental taxes within a given sector within sector but also the role played by environmental taxes in upstream and downstream sectors in terms of input output relationships thirdly we test these relationships also indirectly by verifying whether innovation is one of the channels through which higher sectoral productivity can be achieved by imposing tighter environmental regulations our main findings suggest that downstream stringency is the most relevant driver of innovation and productivity while within sector regulations only affect productivity but not innovation moreover the effect of regulations on productivity is mostly direct while the part of the effect mediated by induced innovations as measured by patents is relevant only for what concerns downstream regulations

allocation of human capital and innovation at the frontier firm level evidence on germany and the netherlands this paper examines how productivity eects of human capital and innovation vary at dierent points of the conditional productivity distribution our analysis draws upon two large unbalanced panels of 6 634 enterprises in germany and 14 586 enterprises in the netherlands over the period 2000 2008 considering 5 manufacturing and services industries that dier in the level of technological intensity industries in the netherlands are characterized by a larger average proportion of high skilled employees and indus tries in germany by a more unequal distribution of human capital intensity except for low technology manufacturing average innovation performance is higher in all industries in germany and the innova tion performance distributions are more dispersed in the netherlands in both countries we observe non linearities in the productivity eects of investing in product innovation in the majority of indus tries frontier rms enjoy the highest returns to product innovation whereas the most negative returns to process innovation are observed in the best performing enterprises of most industries in both countries we nd that the returns to human capital increase with proximity to the technological frontier in industries with a low level of technological intensity strikingly a negative complementarity eect between human capital and proximity to the technological frontier is observed in knowledge intensive services which is most pronounced for the netherlands suggestive evidence for the latter points to a winner takes all interpretation of this nding

convergence in the oecd transitional dynamics or narrowing steady state differences i introduction research on growth and convergence has proceeded through several stages that can be described as a process of accommodating cross country heterogeneity into the convergence equation in the first stage the world could be described as countries approaching to equal absolute convergence or to different conditional convergence steady states in both cases see baumol 1986 barro and sala i martin 1992 or mankiw et al 1992 the assumption of parameter homogeneity of the underlying production function was assumed and not tested later some researchers knight et al 1993 islam 1995 durlauf and johnson 1995 or caselli et al 1996 among others began to challenge the view that the productivity shift parameter of the underlying production function is homogeneous across countries from an econometric point of view the transition from the first to the second stage made researchers resort to panel data methods that exploit the time dimension of data sets a natural extension to accommodate heterogeneity was developed in lee et al 1997 in this third stage the authors extended the use of panel data methods to allow for differences not only in the initial conditions the constant term but also in other coefficients of the production function and in the rate of technological progress itself if there is widespread heterogeneity there are substantial econometric difficulties in obtaining precise estimates of the speed of convergence in particular the estimated rate of convergence is biased downward in cross section regressions see lee et al 1997 or caselli et al 1996 suggesting a slower convergence rate than is actually the case 1 the pooled fixed effect estimator would partially solve the problem of accommodating level effects across countries through heterogeneous intercepts but in dynamic panels heterogeneity in speeds of convergence renders this estimator inconsistent too pesaran and smith 0995 show that the mean group estimator i e estimating the convergence equation separately for each country using annual data and averaging the coefficients is appropriate in this case nevertheless as recognized by these authors this procedure may also be subject to a small sample bias that can be important even for time dimensions as large as 30 years in this article we do not discuss further the advantages or shortcomings of these different econometric methods to estimate convergence equations 2 our aim is not presenting an alternative econometric method to estimate consistently the parameters in growth regressions rather we focus on some implications of the different econometric techniques that so far have been extensively used in the convergence literature and that have been largely unexplored to this end we present three well established estimation approaches as a benchmark of the way the literature has estimated convergence equations in some fundamental contributions and we explore the implications of parameter heterogeneity within the standard mankiw romer and weil theoretical framework cross section and fixed effects models lead us to conclude that the observed reduction in the dispersion of per capita incomes that has taken place among organisation for economic co operation and development oecd countries since the 1960s is mostly a process of transitional dynamics according to this interpretation the dispersion of the long run steady state features of oecd economies has remained fairly stable during the past 40 years if the dispersion of incomes has narrowed it is because these countries started from very different initial conditions and have been approaching their own steady state this is in accordance with the predictions of the standard exogenous growth model mean group estimates tell us a different story namely that the process of transitional dynamics has been negligible oecd countries have never been too far from their steady states and the reduction of dispersion is mostly explained in terms of convergence in steady states themselves that is in the long run determinants of per capita income savings rates human capital accumulation etc

a free lunch in the commons we derive conditions under which raising costs through a regulatory constraint or a fully expropriated tax can increase the profits arising from a common pool resource the basic model assumes a fixed number of identical agents with linear costs selling in a single period at an exogenous price a necessary and sufficient condition for a cost increase to be profitable is that aggregate output from the resource be locally convex in aggregate effort we also show that cost increases can be profitable even if price is endogenous agents are heterogeneous entry is costless or agents are playing a markov perfect equilibrium of a dynamic game we also discuss more general welfare implications of the result along with its relation to existing results for a cournot oligopoly

foreign trade and declining pollution in sweden a decomposition analysis of long term structural and technological effects this article examines whether there exists any causal relationship between foreign trade and declining pollution in developed countries in other words do developed countries outsource their problems to less developed countries rather than solve them the case study is the swedish economy and the two environmental indicators employed are energy consumption and co2 emissions no causal relationships are found since sweden has long been a net exporter of embodied energy and co2 and continues to be so after 1970 when energy consumption stabilizes and co2 emissions decline in addition the ratios of net exported energy and co2 to total consumption remain stable which means there were no effects on the energy intensity or co2 intensity either these results suggest that internal forces like efficiency improvements changed consumption patterns and transformation of the energy system have been crucial for relative environmental improvement in sweden while foreign trade has played no role

the generalized composite commodity theorem and food demand estimation this article reports tests of aggregation over consumer food products and estimates of aggregate food demand elasticities evidence that food demand variables follow unit root processes leads us to build on and simplify existing tests of the generalized composite commodity theorem we compute food demand elasticities using a method of cointegration that is shown to apply to a convenient but nonlinear functional form estimates are based on consumer reported expenditure data rather than commercial disappearance data appropriately specified models of consumer demand are central to market analysis it has been established that a valid equilibrium for markets characterized by diverse firms or diverse consumer products depends on downward sloping composite demand curves heiner braulke wohlgenant or on valid indirect utility functions chavas and cox given the large number of consumer food products food demand and price analysis must be implemented at some level of product aggregation improper aggregation can lead to biased estimates of welfare loss associated with public policies biased estimates of consumer and derived demand elasticities and misleading tests of market power testing for consistent aggregation over food products and estimating aggregate consumer food demand elasticities are the subjects of this article by far the most common justification for aggregation has been separable preferences one reason for its popularity has been the lack of a viable alternative tests of the composite commodity theorem hicks leontief lewbel are always rejected because it restricts relative prices within a group to remain fixed over time on the other hand aggregation based on weak separability is often rejected diewert and wales eales and unnevehr

strategic quality competition and the porter hypothesis abstract this paper offers new support for the porter hypothesis within the context of a quality competition framework we use a duopoly model of vertical product differentiation in which two firms simultaneously choose to produce either a high environmentally friendly quality or low standard quality variant of a good before engaging in price competition in this simple setting we show that a nash equilibrium of the game featuring the low quality good can be pareto dominated by a different strategy profile in which both firms opt in favour of the green product our analysis demonstrates that in such a case both firms stand to profit from the introduction of a rule penalizing any firm refusing to produce the environmentally friendly product we also find that consumers themselves may benefit from such regulations this is always the case when shifting from low quality to high quality production brings about a cost efficiency improvement

specifying human capital a review of the measures of the stock of human capital used in empiricalgrowth research including adult literacy rates school enrollmentratios and average years of schooling of the working age population reveals that human capital is mostly poorly proxied the simple use ofthe most common proxy average years of schooling misspecifies therelationship between education and the stock of human capital based onhuman capital theory the specification of human capital is extended toallow for decreasing returns to education and for differences in thequality of a year of education the different specifications give riseto hugely differing measures of the stock of human capital acrosscountries and development accounting results show that misspecifiedhuman capital measures can lead to severe underestimation of thedevelopment effect of human capital

strategic environmental policy eco dumping or a green strategy abstract the porter hypothesis claims that a strong environmental policy best serves the interests of a nation s export industry while this hypothesis seems to be based on some form of bounded rationality this paper argues that governments may have good reasons for setting an especially strong environmental policy even though firms are fully rational if the available abatement technology turns the environment into an inferior input competitiveness is spurred by a strong environmental policy the government should take advantage of this and set an especially strict emission quota or an especially high emission tax the findings in the paper also has consequences for the desirability of international cooperation with respect to national environmental policy if a strict environmental policy spurs competitiveness the environment is better protected without cooperation

total factor carbon emission performance of fossil fuel power plants in china a metafrontier non radial malmquist index analysis article i nfo this paper proposes the metafrontier non radial malmquist co2 emission performance index mnmcpi for measuring dynamic changes in total factor co2 emission performance over time the mnmcpi method allows for the incorporation of group heterogeneity and non radial slack into the previously introduced malmquist co2 emission performance index mcpi we derive the mnmcpi by solving several non radial data envelop ment analysis dea models we decompose the mnmcpi into an efficiency change ec index a best practice gap change bpc index and a technology gap change tgc index and based on the proposed indices we examine the dynamic changes in co2 emission performance and its decomposition of fossil fuel power plants in china for the 2005 2010 period the empirical results show a 0 38 increase in total factor co2 emission performance as a whole and a u shaped mnmcpi curve for the sample period because companies owned by the central government lack innovation and technological leadership the results suggest a missing link in the role of the central government in promoting co2 emission performance

international comparisons of rural urban educational attainment data and determinants we study cross country differences in rural and urban educational attainment by using a data set comprising 56 countries we focus on the determinants of rural urban educational inequality which is measured by the ratio of rural to urban average years of schooling within each country we find that riskier human capital investment less credit availability a colonial heritage a legal system of french origin and landlockedness of nations are all associated with relatively lower rural educational levels and greater rural urban educational inequality conversely larger formal labor markets better infrastructure and a legal system of british origin are associated with relatively higher rural educational levels and lower rural urban educational inequality we also identify an interaction effect between economic development level and some of these factors in particular we find that as development level increases the negative positive relationship between french british legal systems and rural urban educational inequality is reversed and becomes positive negative

exploring the role of it for environmental sustainability in china an empirical analysis national natural science foundation of china 71202059 fundamental research funds for the central universities china 2011221016 national social science foundation 10zd047

total factor carbon emission performance of the chinese transportation industry a bootstrapped non radial malmquist index analysis this paper proposes a non radial malmquist co2 emission performance index nmcpi for measuring dynamic changes in total factor co2 emission performance over time this index enables the consideration of non radial slacks in the conventional malmquist co2 emission index mcpi the nmcpi is calculated based on a non radial directional distance function derived by several data envelopment analysis dea models furthermore nmcpi could be decomposed into an efficiency change ec index and technological change tc index a bootstrapping approach is conducted to introduce statistical inferences into the nmcpi and its decompositions based on the proposed indices the dynamic co2 emission performance change and its decompositions of the chinese regional transportation industry from 2002 to 2010 are investigated the empirical results demonstrate that the total factor carbon emission performance of the transportation industry as a whole decreased by 32 8 over the period and this reduction was primarily caused by technological decline

can a carbon trading system promote the transformation of a low carbon economy under the framework of the porter hypothesis empirical analysis based on the psm did method abstract global warming is one of the issues of great concern in the world the large scale use of fossil fuels has led to the continuous increase in carbon emissions resulting in global energy shortages and environmental pollution reasonable and strict environmental regulation promotes technological innovation by enterprises to achieve a win win situation between the economy and environment which is the core idea of the porter hypothesis the choice of china as the world s largest energy consumer and carbon emitter is not only related to the country s own mode of economic growth but also determines the development of the world s low carbon economy we used the panel data from 2000 to 2016 of 30 provincial level administrative regions in china and adopted the propensity score matching difference in differences method to test the impact of china s carbon trading pilot system on the transformation of a low carbon economy the empirical results show that under the constraints of the established resources and environment there is a positive relationship to some extent between china s carbon trading system and low carbon economic transformation this relationship can realize the win win situation of environmental and economic benefits as advocated by the porter hypothesis and further verify the applicability of the porter hypothesis

environmental regulations and industrial competitiveness evidence from china economic activities are closely related to real world environmental issues currently more attention is paid to the association between environmental regulations and industrial competitiveness ic because of pressures on economic development and environmental protection in this study we identify and explain the association between environmental regulations and ic in china as the largest developing country in the world china has the unavoidable responsibility of protecting the environment and promoting global economic development we analyse the mechanisms behind environmental regulations and industrial competiveness at the provincial level and conclude that the impact of environmental regulations upon ic is not a simple linear one but a u shaped relationship it is argued that the crucial intervention to activate the u shaped relationship or porter s hypothesis is innovation which can be triggered by stringent regulations and well designed policies

taxing variable cost environmental regulation as industrial policy abstract conventional wisdom has it that a country that enacts strict environmental regulations will place its firms at a competitive disadvantage this view has been challenged recently some commentators argue that stricter regulation will enhance domestic competitiveness strict regulations induce innovation we evaluate this argument in a strategic trade model in very special cases a strengthening of regulation may result in a shift of profits from foreign to domestic firms this is not a general result however environmental regulation should of course be imposed to control externalities but it is unlikely that it will serve to generate industrial advantage

adoption of green chemistry an analysis based on us patents abstract green chemistry patents are an indicator of environmental innovation and r d over 3200 green chemistry patents were granted in the us patent system between 1983 and 2001 with most assigned to the chemical sector the university and government sectors place greater emphasis on green chemistry than most industrial sectors worldwide the emphasis on green chemistry technology relative to chemical plastic rubber and polymer technologies has increased since 1988 the united states appears to have a competitive advantage in green chemistry the most rapid growth in the emphasis on us green chemistry patents coincides with revisions to major us environmental laws in the late 1980s and early 1990s however the ratio of green chemistry patents to patents in other areas of chemical sciences in heavily regulated industries are low suggesting that these industries did not necessarily embrace green chemistry as a means to reduce their regulatory burden

natural versus manufactured capital win lose or win win a case study of the finnish pulp and paper industry abstract the effect of investments on environmental variables has been discussed through the win win rhetoric specifically in micro level analysis on the macro level the win win rhetoric has been replaced by the arguments for and against the substitutability of natural and manufactured capital here these two concepts belonging to different levels of analysis are linked by looking at the environmental and economic effects of chosen investment strategies in a traditionally capital intensive industry over time the paper shows that rather than generalise the existence of win win situations or the substitutability of capital these positions are determined by purely situational factors as a result in the assessment of substitutability the specific operating context of the industry needs to be taken into account this implies also that environmental policy needs to be designed to be adaptive and responsive to those situational factors to create beneficial outcomes for the economy and for the environment

environmental regulation and sustainable competitiveness evaluating the role of firm level green investments in the context of the porter hypothesis we investigate the impact of environmental regulation on firm performance and investment behavior exploiting the case of a german water withdrawal regulation that is managed on the state level we analyze firms reactions to an increase in the water tax using a regression adjusted difference in differences approach we analyze the individual firm s response to a change in environmental regulation distinguishing between add on and integrated environmental investments this allows us to include innovation diffusion into our analysis which is likely to be of importance for increasing resource efficiency our results show that the regulation in question shows no sign of affecting firms overall competitiveness the results imply that the predicted negative impact of the regulation on firms economic performance that was brought up before the introduction of the tax does not seem to weigh heavily in this case nevertheless when placed into a sustainable competitiveness context the regulation considered does not qualify as an appropriate policy tool for fostering green growth

endogenous timing in strategic environmental policymaking in this paper we endogenize the timing of policymaking in a simple two country model of strategic environmental policy we consider a timing game in which two policymakers non cooperatively decide their preferred sequence of moves before setting emission tax rates we show that whether the policymakers implement emission tax policies simultaneously or sequentially crucially depends on the magnitude of environmental damages when the damages are insignificant the tax rates are strategic substitutes and the simultaneous move policymaking emerges in equilibrium in contrast when the damages are significant the tax rates are strategic complements and sequential move policymaking emerges we also extend the model by allowing for differences in the vulnerability to environmental damages between countries when the differences are large the unique equilibrium of the game is the situation where the less vulnerable country acts as a leader in the case where multiple equilibrium emerges the risk dominant equilibrium is also that where the less vulnerable country leads

uk s climate change levy cost effectiveness competitiveness and environmental impacts this paper intends to examine the cost effectiveness of uk s climate change levy ccl its implications on competitiveness of firms and the environmental impact the paper briefly describes the levy and analyses it under the cannons of a good taxation policy the economic implications of the levy are discussed with theoretical and empirical perspectives change in net exports investment patterns and productivity and inclusion of compliance cost forms the basis for analysing the effect on competitiveness it discusses the options available to firms to safeguard their competitiveness if it is adversely affected by the ccl a description of the current scenario of the levy since its inception is also presented the paper argues the need for a comprehensive policy involving the use of standards emission trading as well as energy taxes to achieve emission and energy use reductions a focal point of this paper is to elucidate the pros and cons of the ccl energy tax with respect to an emission trading scheme

capital accumulation under technological progress and learning a vintage capital approach abstract in standard capital accumulation models all capital goods are equally productive and produce goods of the same quality however due to technological progress in reality it holds most of the time that newer capital goods are either more productive process innovation or produce goods of better quality product innovation implications of process innovation for the firm s investment policies are investigated while the output price development is subject to a business cycle and a given generation of capital goods gets more productive over time due to learning the problem is turned into an optimal control model that distinguishes the vintages of capital goods and where unlike most of the recent contributions it is possible to keep on investing in older technologies it is shown that i learning is one of the reasons why a firm may invest in old technologies even when apparently superior technologies are available ii investments in machines of a given age increase more over time under faster technological progress iii under faster technological progress investments are more vulnerable to output price developments and iv on average machines are older during recessions in deciding whether to invest in newer or older capital goods also the lower productivity due to aging versus differences in cost of discounting and acquisition have to be taken into account

does the porter hypothesis explain expected future financial performance the effect of clean water regulation on chemical manufacturing firms previous research provides opposing theoretical arguments regarding the effect of environmental regulation on financial performance as one important argument the porter hypothesis claims that tighter regulation improves financial performance this study provides empirical evidence on this debated effect in particular we employ panel data analysis to examine the effect of clean water act regulation as measured by permitted wastewater discharge limits on expected future financial performance as measured by tobin s q for publicly owned firms in the chemical manufacturing industries we find that tighter permitted discharge limits lower tobin s q i e more stringent clean water act regulation undermines expected future financial performance by decomposing tobin s q into its constituent components market value and replacement costs and estimating each component separately we find that tighter permitted discharge limits lower both components with a larger impact on market value which implies that investors revise their expectations of the discounted present value of future profits in response to changes in clean water act regulation

why environmental management may yield no regret pollution abatement options empirical evidence supports the existence of pollution abatement possibilities at negative costs the so called no regret options we provide a microeconomic rationale for the existence of such potential at the firm level an econometric application confirms that pollution abatement cost curves with no regret options are compatible with a standard production function as stated in our theoretical model c 2008 elsevier b v all rights reserved

environmental taxation and strategic commitment in duopoly models in this paper we address the issue of optimalenvironmental taxation under imperfect competition the problem is analysed for three different types ofduopoly models the cournot open and closed loopmodels and the stackelberg model we explicitlyanalyse the role of strategic behaviour each firm hasto make a choice of output level and of the level ofa strategic variable the choice of this strategicvariable affects both marginal cost and emissions wecompare the properties of these three duopoly models and derive and compare optimal environmental taxes weshow that whether the optimal tax is lower or higherthan marginal environmental costs depends on theinformation transmission and the effect of thestrategic variable on marginal costs in addition thedifferences in market shares and the influence of thetax on the cost structure play important roles indetermining optimal emission taxes

extended producer responsibility instruments and innovation in eco design an exploration through a simulation model abstract this paper presents an agent based simulation model that models both economical and physical relations between firms recyclers and consumers this framework allows an investigation into the connection between physical environmental variables waste flows virgin material flows and economic decisions of agents in the product chain i e firms innovation strategies consumers choices and development of recycling activities the paper highlights the value of using agent based modeling as an operational tool to investigate the effect of waste prevention policy on economic and technological decisions of agents we focus on three types of extended producer responsibility epr instruments which are recycling fees tax subsidy and norms the simulation results show that the impact of each instrument depends on the policy design in particular on the level of stringency and on the reward system which is implemented we show that only tax subsidy systems and stringent norms can lead to radical innovations and to significant changes in product designs in the case of tax subsidy the impact relies more on an innovation effect while in the case of norm it mainly relies on a selection effect

renewable energy and employment in germany abstract the positive impacts of an increasing share of renewable energy on the mitigation of climate change as well as on the decrease of the dependency of energy imports are indisputable however one persistent problem for the german economy has been its high level of unemployment in the recent past therefore any policy strategy will be measured also by its net impact on the labor market the paper describes the results of a study that models this impact and is novel within three respects firstly an input output vector for the renewable energy sector was developed based on the results of more than 1000 interviews with an extensive questionnaire secondly gross and net effect of two different policy scenarios for germany until 2030 were calculated and thirdly the approach varies from earlier studies by its explicit modeling of export and foreign trade effects

does host market regulation induce cross border environmental innovation this paper evaluates the effect of host country environmental policy stringency on the offshoring of environmental patents for 2000 top world r d performers it is shown that a more stringent environmental regulation triggers both the extensive and intensive margin of patent offshoring in the field of environmental technologies results are robust to various different specifications alternative definitions of innovation offshoring and of regulation restrictions and to the consideration of possible endogeneity of regulation it is suggested inter alia that r d subsidies and non market based regulatory measures are more important than market based instruments as drivers of cross border environmental innovation length 26 pages

environmental value chain in green sme networks the threat of the abilene paradox abstract demand side policies are an important complement to subsidies in fostering green product service markets green public procurement gpp in particular presents valuable characteristics in terms of directionality volumes and measurability despite being widely analysed from a public perspective gpp development is still under explored from a corporate point of view to shed some light on the strategic attitude of firms towards gpp this paper discusses an exploratory research in the field of road construction an inductive analysis of direct observations and theoretical contributions suggests the potential for the so called abilene paradox to hamper gpp opportunities for small and medium enterprises in fact in times of crisis increased pressures to improve performance and reduce risk resistance to change and strategic myopia can easily impair inter organizational interactions and thus prevent potentially innovative networks from pressuring public investments in green supply chains the related policy suggestions represent a first attempt to enter the realm of systemic approaches to gpp

environmental policy the porter hypothesis and the composition of capital effects of learning and technological progress abstract in this paper the effect of environmental policy on the composition of capital is investigated by allowing for nonlinearities it generalizes xepapadeas and de zeeuw j environ econ manage 37 1999 165 and determines scenarios in which their results do not carry over in particular we show that the way acquisition cost of investment decreases with the age of the capital stock is of crucial importance we also focus more explicitly on learning and technological progress among others we obtain that in the presence of learning implementing a stricter environmental policy with the aim to reach a certain target of emissions reduction has a stronger negative effect on industry profits which implies quite the opposite as to what is described by the porter hypothesis

technical change external economies and the porter hypothesis abstract michael porter introduces the idea that environmental regulations may benefit affected firms this paper derives results consistent with porter s hypothesis by employing a general equilibrium framework with a large number of agents external economies of scale in production and discrete changes in technology the model shows that endogenous technical change makes porter s hypothesis feasible however a policy that produces results consistent with porter s hypothesis is not necessarily optimal

human capital inequality and economic growth some new evidence this paper provides new measures of human capital inequality for a broad panel of countries taking attainment levels from barro and lee 2001 we compute gini coefficients and the distribution of education by quintiles for 108 countries over five year intervals from 1960 to 2000 using this new cross country data on human capital inequality two main conclusions are obtained first most countries in the world have tended to reduce the inequality in human capital distribution second human capital inequality measures provide more robust results than income inequality measures in the estimation of standard growth and investment equations

governance pressures and performance outcomes of sustainable supply chain management an empirical analysis of uk manufacturing industry although sustainable supply chain management sscm has recently received increasing attention among uk manufacturing firms there is a concern as to whether sscm practices are being implemented because they are profitable or only because of governance coercive pressure thus the aims of this paper are twofold first determining the role of governance in the adoption of sscm practices second investigating whether sscm practices can be both environmentally beneficial and commercially viable in light of these issues this paper develops and empirically assesses an integrated model of governance pressures sscm practices performance data was collected from 146 uk manufacturing managers and analysed using the structural equation modelling method exogenous driving forces of governance were found to be precursors to the successful implementation of sscm practices the empirical results further suggest that while the implementation of sustainable supply chain management has a positive effect on environmental performance it does not necessarily lead to improved economic performance as only sustainable procurement was found to have a positive effect on economic performance this paper contributes to the literature by highlighting the role of governance in sscm adoption and performance gains in environmental protection while economic performance is partially compromised the results also provide useful insights for both managers seeking to adopt sustainable practices and policy makers seeking to further promote sustainable supply chain

social cost of environmental quality regulations a general equilibrium analysis the use of cost benefit analysis by federal regulatory agencies has expanded greatly in scope and sophistication unfortunately agencies continue to employ private cost rather than social cost to evaluate environmental quality regulations furthermore general equilibrium impacts and intertemporal effects of regulations are typically not included in the evaluation in this paper we estimate the social cost of environmental quality regulations mandated by the clean air and clean water acts we construct an econometric general equilibrium model of the united states to demonstrate that social cost estimates diverge sharply from private cost estimates we also demonstrate that general equilibrium impacts are significant and pervasive and that intertemporal effects of the regulations heretofore ignored are significant

industrial eco efficiency in china a provincial quantification using three stage data envelopment analysis abstract the coordinated development of industrialization and the ecological environment is vital to achieve ecological civilization in china integratively considering the economy energy and resources and environment this study aims to measure the industrial eco efficiency of 30 provinces autonomous regions and municipalities in china between 2005 and 2013 a three stage data envelopment analysis dea modeling approach is adopted to eliminate interference of the external environment and statistical noise with industrial eco efficiency measurement the results show that regional industrial eco efficiency in china is affected by the factors of the environmental regulation technological innovation level of economic development and industrial structure after eliminating the impacts of external environment and statistical noise china s national average industrial eco efficiency declines by 30 between 2005 and 2013 the industrial eco efficiency of the 30 provinces increases but at different rates of growth the variation of overall regional industrial eco efficiency is primarily caused by scale efficiency furthermore all the 30 provinces are classified into four groups to interpret the causes of variation and differences of regional industrial eco efficiency in general the management and technology level and the economy of scale of industries should be improved simultaneously even though specific opportunities for industrial eco efficiency improvement vary across provinces in china

schooling externalities technology and productivity theory and evidence from u s states abstract the literature on schooling externalities in u s cities and states is rather mixed positive external effects of average education levels are hardly found while positive externalities from the share of college graduates are more often identified we propose a simple model to reconcile this mixed evidence our model predicts positive externalities from increased college education and negligible external effects from high school education using compulsory attendance child labor laws push driven immigration of highly educated workers and the location of land grant colleges as instruments for schooling attainments we test and confirm the model predictions with data on u s states for the period 1960 2000

assessing whether corporate social responsibility influence corporate value abstractthis study used the corporate social responsibility csr index to gauge the corporate value and social responsibility performance of corporations in taiwan we investigated whether csr influences corporate value and whether the extent of that influence varies with corporate value or time the results indicate that the influence of csr on corporate value does not change with time csr exerts a positive influence on company value and this influence does not change over time however the extent of the influence significantly varies with corporate value when the corporate value of a company is not high investing in csr would only increase costs and fail to effectively increase corporate value in contrast if the corporate value of the company is high investments in csr in this circumstance would instead promote the effective increase of corporate value

schooling data technological diffusion and the neoclassical model this research was supported by the spanish ministry of science and technology through cicyt grants sec99 1189 and sec99 0820 and by the spanish ministry of finance and fundacion caixa galicia

what is the role of openness for china s aggregate industrial so2 emission a structural analysis based on the divisia decomposition method abstract having observed the weaknesses in previous structural analyses on the role of environmental kuznets curve ekc the author proposes a detailed analysis using a rich data set of provincial level production and so2 emission intensity of 13 industrial sectors the latter represent more than 98 of the total industrial production in each chinese province for the period 1991 2001 through the use of the log mean divisia index decomposition method the variations in province level industrial so2 emissions with regard to the 1990 baseline level are decomposed into the contribution from three components scale composition and technical effects the following analysis seeks to explain how trade openness affects aggregate industrial so2 emission through its impact on the structural determinants for these three components of region specific environmental variations

optimal pollution taxation in a cournot duopoly it is well known that the optimal pollution tax in a competitive industry is equal to the marginal damage inflicted by the pollution it has also been shown that the optimal pollution tax on a monopoly is less than the marginal damage in this paper i derive the optimal pollution tax for a cournot duopoly if firms have different production costs the optimal tax rate may exceed the marginal damage this is so because the tax may be an effective instrument for allocating production from the less to the more efficient firm it is also shown that if one firm has a positive most preferred pollution tax the sum of consumer and producer surpluses will be declining in the tax at this level

where has all the education gone cross national data show no association between increases in human capital attributable to the rising educational attainment of the labor force and the rate of growth of output per worker this implies that the association of educational capital growth with conventional measures of total factor production is large strongly statistically significant and negative these are on average results derived from imposing a constant coefficient however the development impact of education varied widely across countries and has fallen short of expectations for three possible reasons first the institutional governance environment could have been sufficiently perverse that the accumulation of educational capital lowered economic growth second marginal returns to education could have fallen rapidly as the supply of educated labor expanded while demand remained stagnant third educational quality could have been so low that years of schooling created no human capital the extent and mix of these three phenomena vary from country to country in explaining the actual economic impact of education or the lack thereof

environmental regulation and technology transfers this paper analyzes the situation in which a national government introduces environmental regulations within the framework of an international duopoly with environmental regulations an environmental tax imposed by the government in the home country can induce a foreign firm with advanced abatement technology to license it to a domestic firm without this technology furthermore when the domestic firm s production technology is less efficient than that of the foreign firm the foreign firm may freely reveal its technology to the domestic firm these improvements through the voluntary transfer of technology imply that environmental regulations have positive impacts on innovation resume reglementation environnementale et transferts de technologie ce texte analyse le cas d un gouvernement national qui etablit des reglementations environnementales dans le cadre d un duopole international avec reglementations environnementales le gouvernement national impose une taxe environnementale au plan domestique qui peut induire une firme etrangere qui dispose d une technologie avancee qui reduit l impact environnemental a vendre une licence permettant d utiliser cette technologie a une firme domestique qui ne l a pas de plus quand la technologie de production de la firme domestique est moins efficace que celle de la firme etrangere la firme etrangere peut reveler sa technologie a la firme domestique ces ameliorations a travers les transferts volontaires de technologie impliquent que les reglementations environnementales ont des impacts positifs sur l innovation

environmental policy and the equilibrium rate of unemployment abstract this paper integrates environmental policy instruments with the theory of equilibrium unemployment we investigate the question of whether a low equilibrium rate of unemployment and a high quality of the environment are complementary policy goals or must be traded off it turns out that an interval exists for a tax on emissions where the two goals are indeed complementary the tax stimulates the emergence of an abatement sector which provides pollution control and vacancies for the job seekers for constrained efficiency the policy maker operates five instruments to internalize the environmental and the search externalities a tax on emissions employment subsidies and recruiting allowances for the polluting industries are sufficient to implement the first best the optimal emission tax is an increasing function of the workers bargaining strength for labor markets where workers have a strong bargaining position the optimal pollution tax may easily exceed the pigouvian tax

anticipation effects of technological progress on capital accumulation a vintage capital approach abstract due to embodied technological progress new generations of capital goods are more productive therefore in order to study the effects of technological progress a model must be analyzed in which different generations of capital goods can be distinguished we determine in what way the firm adjusts current investments to predictions of technological progress in the presence of market power we show that a negative anticipation effect occurs i e current investments in recent generations of capital goods decline when faster technological progress will take place in the future because then it becomes more attractive to wait for new generations of capital goods in case that only investments in new machines are possible actually a whole wave of anticipation phases arises

integrated environmental product innovation in the region of munich and its impact on company competitiveness abstract this paper examines the impact of environmental innovations on company competitiveness of both the environment industry and related sectors in the region of munich the focus is on the drivers of these innovations and their respective effects on innovating companies not only innovations in the area of end of pipe technologies but also the development of integrated products and production methods are examined in a regional case study approach a sample of 14 manufacturing and service companies in munich southern germany was interviewed essentially environmental innovation is driven by a mixture of factors internal and external to the firm not only regulatory pressure but also cost pressure competitive advantages technological lead and customer pressure are important drivers regulatory pushed innovations contribute to the competitive performance of sample companies in a similar way as environmental innovations which are carried out voluntarily that would yield proof for the so called porter hypothesis which assumes that environmental legislation stimulates innovation and leads to win win opportunities where simultaneously pollution is reduced and productivity increased

environmental regulation a value theoretic and class based analysis following a value theoretic and class based approach it is argued in this paper that ecological problems are inseparably linked to the process of extracting surplus value in capitalism and owing to their adverse impacts instigate struggles over the appropriation of nature these struggles fought within and outside the state by competing agents shape environmental regulation in particular taxes permits command and control measures and subsidies affect prices profits and rents and have class and other social implications evidence of current environmental regulation shows that it takes places under the great influence of capitalist concerns

public preferences for carbon tax attributes the impacts of climate change are already visible throughout the world recognizing the threats posed by climate change the durban platform the 17th session of the conference of parties cop 17 underscores that the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation and ambitious action by all countries a crucial starting point for the design of effective and publicly acceptable policies is to explore public preferences for climate policy instruments using a choice experiment this study investigates public preferences for carbon tax attributes in a developing country context the results account for heterogeneity in preferences and show that turkish people prefer a carbon tax with a progressive cost distribution rather than one with a regressive cost distribution the private cost has a negative effect on the probability of choosing the tax earmarking carbon tax revenues increases the public acceptability of the tax moreover there is a preference for a carbon tax that promotes public awareness of climate change

reviewing the business case for corporate social responsibility new evidence and analysis this study complements previous empirical research on the business case for corporate social responsibility csr by employing hitherto unused data on corporate social performance csp and proposing statistical analyses to account for bi directional causality between social and financial performance by allowing for differences in the importance of single components of csp between industries the data in this study overcome certain limitations of the databases used in earlier studies the econometrics employed offer a rigorous way of addressing the problem of endogeneity due to simultaneous causality although the study s results provide no evidence that there is a generic or universal business case for csr they indicate that there is a strong link between single stakeholder related issues of csr and financial performance however the analysis does not establish causality within these relationships

on market equilibrium analysis in this paper we develop the implications of competitive market equilibrium for production and household behavior when some prices are endogenously determined the properties of market equilibrium functions are explored including the effects of pricing policy a slutsky type equation relating compensated and uncompensated market equilibrium functions is derived implications for multimarket welfare analysis are presented focusing on the effects of pricing policy and technical change

the impact of green innovation on energy intensity an empirical analysis for 14 industrial sectors in oecd countries abstract this paper analyses the impact of green innovation on energy intensity in a set of 14 industrial sectors in 17 oecd countries over the 1975 2005 period we create a stock of green patents for each industrial sector and estimate a translog cost function to measure the impact of green innovation on energy intensity next to other factors such as input substitution and autonomous technical change we find that green innovation has contributed to the decline in energy intensity in the majority of sectors the median elasticity of energy intensity with respect to green patenting is estimated at 0 03 in our sample hence a 1 increase in green patenting activities in a given sector is associated with a 0 03 decline in energy intensity the magnitude of the effect is robust across various specifications and is larger in more recent years a decomposition exercise shows that overall half of the decrease in energy intensity over the sample period is related to changes in input prices and half to changes in production technologies