This paper considers environmental labelling (or ecolabelling for short) as an informational instrument of environmental policy. It examines some economic aspects of environmental labelling, for example, the function of product certification to overcome market failures for environmental superior...

This paper discusses aspects related to the green technology sector in Germany. In a ï¬rst step institutional reforms enabling diffusion of green technologies are analysed. Cost arguments are also taken into account. In a second step a theoretical model developed by Tanguay et al. (2004) is...

During the last years, the renewable energy strategy of the European Union (EU) and the proposed policies and regulations, namely the Renewable Energy Directive (RED), have been heavily discussed among scientific circles and various interest groups. The sustainability of different biofuels and...

We compare the performance of liability rules for managing environmental disasters when third parties are harmed and cannot always be compensated. A firm can invest in safety to reduce the likelihood of accidents. The firm's investment is unobservable to authorities. Externality and asymmetric...

The main objective of the European Council Directive 96/61/EC concerning integrated pollution prevention and control is to achieve an integrated approach of environmental protection by co-ordinating the authorization procedures of the competent authorities. However, by prescribing the permit...

Since 1975 the European Union has developed an impressive body of waste management legislation, though, according to the principle of subsidiarity, responsibilities belong to the most local level at which the tasks can be carried out effectively. This paper examines several factors that...

Structural vector-autoregressive models are potentially very useful tools for guiding both macro- and microeconomic policy. In this paper, we present a recently developed method for exploiting non-Gaussianity in the data for estimating such models, with the aim of capturing the causal structure...

Transparency in teams can induce cooperation. We study contribution decisions by agents when previous decisions can be observed. We find that an information chain, in which each agent directly observes only the decision of her immediate predecessor, is at least as effective as a...

We investigate whether the supply of venture capital (VC) is driven by spatial proximity between a VC company and the portfolio firm. Our analysis is based on information about VC investments in Germany between 2004 and 2009. We find that possible problems caused by the geographic distance to a...

We experimentally test the effect of enforceable non-compete clauses on working efforts. The employee can invest into the probability of making a profitable innovation. After a successful innovation (Win) the employee may want to leave the firm (Shift) whereas after an innovation failure (Lose)...