Harris R. and Robinson C. (2005) Impact of Regional Selective Assistance on sources of productivity growth: plant-level evidence from UK manufacturing, 1990-98, Regional Studies 39 , 751-765. Regional policy has been an enduring aspect of post-war industrial policy in the UK, based on a...

Ambitious environmental policies are necessary to enable the transition to a greener economy. However, these policies could impose economic burdens on firms through different channels. They may increase barriers to entry and distort competition. They may also impose transaction and...

Environmental policies seek to address market failures related to the protection of the environment. However, they may also increase barriers to entry and distort competition. If stringent environmental policies can be designed in a way that minimises such economic burdens, they can facilitate...

This paper measures the extent to which prices exceed marginal costs in the U.S. natural gas distribution market during the period 1991-2007. We find large departures from marginal cost pricing in all 50 states, with residential and commercial customers facing average markups of over 40%. Based...

Residential natural gas customers in the United States face volumetric charges for natural gas that average about 30% more than marginal cost. The large markup on natural gas - which is used to cover the fixed infrastructure and operating costs of the local distribution companies - is widely...

This paper investigates to what extent and under what circumstances environmental regulation can be designed and implemented to jointly achieve positive environmental outcomes and sustained competitive strength in the mining industry. First the paper provides a conceptual analysis of the impacts...

This paper investigates the implications of the materials balance for optimal environmental policy. We find that neglecting the materials–emissions relationship – as is common in models of optimal environmental regulation – implies biases, whose sign depends on the regulatory instrument...

In view of the controversial policy debate on “green” growth and corresponding stimulus packages we empirically investigate the production effects of environmental investment as well as of environmental and energy expenditures. Using a panel dataset of German manufacturing sectors our...

This paper examines the optimal control of CO2 emissions from a perspective of efficiency analysis. Several centralized data envelopment analysis (DEA) models are introduced to study the optimal allocation of CO2 emissions under spatial, temporal and spatial–temporal allocation strategies,...

We use newly-available Indian panel data to estimate how the returns to planting-stage investments vary by rainfall realizations. We show that the forecasts significantly affect farmer investment decisions and that these responses account for a substantial fraction of the inter-annual...