This thesis consists of a summary and four self-contained papers. <p> Paper [I] Following the 1987 report by The World Commission on Environment and Development, the genuine saving has come to play a key role in the context of sustainable development, and the World Bank regularly publishes numbers...</p>

Many quality dimensions are hard to contract upon and are at risk of degradation when the service is procured rather than produced in-house. On the other hand, procurement may foster performance-improving innovation. We assemble a large data set on elderly care services in Sweden for the...

Using a unique and highly detailed data set on energy consumption at the appliance-level for 200 Swedish households, seemingly unrelated regression (SUR)-based end-use specific load curves are estimated. The estimated load curves are then used to explore possible restrictions on load shifting...

This thesis consists of four papers studying economic aspects of natural resource and environmental management in Namibia. <p> Paper [I] analyses changes in Namibian energy use patterns between 1980 and 1998. The study finds that, unlike their counterparts in many other developing countries where...</p>

Today, many countries around the world respond to the global warming and its consequences with various policy instruments such as e.g. taxes, subsidies, emission permit trading, regulations and information campaigns. In the economic literature, policy instruments have typically been analyzed...

The main objective of this paper is to analyze the potential goal conflict between two of Sweden’s environmental objectives: Sustainable Forests and Reduced Climate Impact – or, more precisely, the conflict between forest conservation and the supply of wood fuel. To accomplish this, we use a...

Several countries are responding to the climate change threat with various policy measures (e.g., taxes, permit trading, regulations, information campaigns, etc). While the effectiveness of different measures (instruments) has been studied extensively, very little research exists related to...

This paper evaluates the impact of changes in current Swedish energy taxation by analyzing a panel of approximately 150 district heating plants in Sweden. We estimate plant-specific production functions and derive the economic repercussions of the tax. We also estimate the resulting changes of...

This paper analyzes whether marginal taxation of labor and capital income might be useful second best instruments for internalizing the externalities caused by conspicuous housing consumption, when the government is unable to implement a first best corrective tax on housing wealth. The rationale...

This thesis consists of an introductory part and three papers. <p> Paper [I] examines how taxes affect consumption of commodities that are detrimental to health and the environment. Specifically, this paper examines if a tax increase leads to a significantly larger change in consumption than a...</p>