Signature requirements are often used as hurdles to prevent overuse of public referenda. We evaluate the causal effect of lowering signature requirements on the number of observed citizen initiatives. Based on municipality-level data for Germany, we make use of legislative changes at specific...

High and persistent unemployment rates and increasing awareness of environmental degradation in many industrial countries have promoted the interest in the labour market effects of environmental policy. Environmental labour market analysis is fraught with many difficulties, however. Being...

This paper explores the extent to which emissions limits on stack concentrations under the Large Combustion Plant (LCP) Directive succeeded in mitigating local air pollutants from thermal power stations in the European Union. We take advantage of the discontinuities in regulation status to show...

This paper explores the extent to which the Large Combustion Plant (LCP) Directive succeeded in mitigating local air pollutants from thermal electricity generating plants in the European Union. Using yearly data on plant-level operations from the EEA, we investigate whether emissions limits on...

Environmental policies frequently target the ratio of dirty to green output within the same industry. To achieve such targets the green sector may be subsidised or the dirty sector be taxed. This paper shows that in a monopolistic competition setting the two policy instruments have different...

The relationship between per capita income and a number of pollution indicators has been found to display an inverted U-shaped or downward-sloping pattern. Corruption may affect this relationship in two distinct ways: by raising pollution at given income levels (direct effect) and by reducing...

This paper provides first empirical insights on the relationship between green public procurement (GPP) and firms' innovation activities. Considering that the public sector is a large buyer in the economy, public procurement is able to work as demand-pull factor for new products and thus...

How do firms respond to greener household preferences? We construct a novel index of environmental willingness to act on the state-quarter level based on Google Trends search data. Relating the index to firm-level information on the U.S. auto- motive sector from 2006 to 2019, we find ambiguous...

This paper addresses the issue of estimating and forecasting productivity growth trends in the US and Germany from the perspective of a business cycle researcher who wants to use the available information in time series of aggregate labor productivity to derive a model for short- and/or...

In the year 2000, the German government passed the most ambitious tax reform in postwar German history aiming at a significant tax relief for households. An important aim of this tax reform was to improve work incentives and, thereby, foster employment. Drawing on data of the German Socio...