Researchers have utilized the fact that many states have term limits (as opposed to being eligible for re-election) for governors to determine how changes in electoral incentives alter state regulatory agency behavior. This paper asks whether these impacts spill over into private sector...

France has a very ambitious environmental-policy agenda, aimed chiefly at cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but also at dealing with local air and water pollution, waste management and the conservation of biodiversity. The laws that followed the Grenelle de l'environnement encompass policy...

We study how the shadow economy affects pollution and how this effect depends on corruption levels in public administration. Production in the shadow economy allows firms to avoid environmental regulation policies; a large informal sector may be accompanied by higher pollution levels. Our...

One of the biggest obstacles in cross-country empirical research in the area of environmental economics is the absence of a sound indicator quantifying environmental policy stringency. A variety of indicators have been proposed and are currently used. Almost none of them rely on an explicitly...

This is the online appendix to the paper "How should we measure environmental policy stringency? A new approach" (Sauter, 2014). The main paper outlines the general methodology proposed to construct environmental policy indexes and proposes a first implementation of a CO2 input index and a CO2...

This paper investigates how greenhouse gas (GHG) policy stringency affects anthropogenic CO2 emissions using a new GHG policy stringency indicator and a structural spatial VAR approach. We estimate an average country-specific elasticity of CO2 emissions to GHG policy stringency, and assess the...

Creativity is often highly concentrated in time and space, and across different domains. What explains the formation and decay of clusters of creativity? We match data on notable individuals born in Europe between the XIth and the XIXth century with historical city data. The production and...

Using a unique plant-level dataset we examine total factor productivity (TFP) growth and its components, related to efficiency change and technical change. The data we use is from Sweden and for their pulp and paper industry, which is heavily regulated due to its historically large contribution...

The world has pledged to protect 30 percent of its land and waters by 2030 to halt the rapid deterioration of critical ecosystems. We summarize the state of knowledge about the impacts of protected area policies, with a focus on deforestation and vegetation cover. We discuss critical issues...

We analyse two mechanism designs for refunding emission payments to polluting firms: output-based refunding (OBR) and expenditure-based refunding (EBR). In both instruments, emission fees are returned to the polluting industry, typically making the policy more politically acceptable than a...